Lucia Romano (guest professor at ETH and guest scientist at TOMCAT) has just returned from the largest conference devoted to electron, ion and photon beam technology and nanofabrication (EIPBN) in US, where she gave an invited talk about “Fabrication of high aspect ratio metal gratings for X-ray phase contrast interferometry”. “The main challenge in grating-based X-ray interferometry – she said – is the fabrication of high aspect ratio absorbing gratings (periodic metal microstructures), whose quality strongly affects the X-ray imaging sensitivity.” In her talk, she reviewed the microfabrication strategy of TOMCAT with special focus on a novel approach using hot embossing for metal casting into silicon etched trenches.