Deming Shu, senior engineer for nanopositioning with Argonne’s X-ray Science Division at the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science's Advanced Photon Source, was one of the recipients of a 2016 R&D 100 Award, which annually recognize the 100 most innovative technologies and services of the past year. The award was for development of the Hard X-Ray Scanning Microscope with Multilayer Laue Lens (MLL) Nanofocusing Optics, a high-throughput scientific imaging tool that routinely provides sub-20-nanometer spatial resolution imaging. The sub-20-nanometer imaging resolution was achieved by using the MLL optics for focusing and by implementing a state-of-the-art, ultra-stable piezo-based positioning system coupled with active interferometric feedback control, the combination of which provides unprecedented vibrational stability (better than 2 nanometers at all frequencies) and long-term thermal drifts better than 2 nanometers per hour. This novel MLL-based vacuum-compatible microscope is a general-purpose x-ray microscopy tool that is suitable for a broad range of imaging experiments. For example, the following imaging techniques are currently supported: x-ray fluorescence, ptychography, diffraction, differential phase contrast, and x-ray absorption spectroscopy. The system is installed at the Hard X-ray Nanoprobe beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The other R&D 100 winners for the nanofocusing device are Brookhaven physicists Evgeny Nazaretski and Yong Chu, who led the project, and Kenneth Lauer, Hanfei Yan, Brian Mullany, Nathalie Bouet, Juan Zhou, and Dennis Kuhne, also of Brookhaven.