Development of a Prototype Carbon Nanomaterial Advanced Xray Source

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Xray sources are ubiquitous. Conceived more than a century ago, they are found in airport luggage scanners and hospital wards; they are common place in electronics validation equipment, and are essential to foreign body detection systems in the food and pharmaceuticals industries. Most systems, however, employ thermionic sources that operate at high temperatures, are inefficient, cannot be pusled rapidly. In contrast, field emission sources are efficient, operate at room temperature and respond almost instantaneously in time. Nevertheless, despite many technological advantages, field emission sources have yet to be widely adopted due to inherent fundamental material limitations. Nanomaterials, an emerging class of materials measuring less than one thousandth the width of a human hair, are capable of resisting such aggressive conditions. In the Cambridge Xray Systems feasibility study a nanoengineered prototype Xray source, grown atom-by-atom, will be developed.