About us
Prof. Stampanoni heads a group of over 20 people, including four beamline scientists, one industrial liaison scientist, one technician, several scientists, many postdocs, PhD students, master students, and bachelor students. The team focuses on the development of tools, both instrumentation and algorithms, for tomographic X-ray imaging, exploiting synchrotron and laboratory sources. The group is engaged in the design and construction of ultra-fast data acquisition systems (stroboscopic coherent X-ray radiology and tomography) to provide dynamic investigation of rapidly evolving systems. The group also intensively develops optimized applications for fast, concurrent post-processing of tomographic data starting from simple normalization corrections to ad-hoc reconstruction and artifact reductions algorithms. Finally, the group investigates, creates and optimizes novel imaging modalities based on the coherent properties of synchrotron radiation and works on the translation of such work to conventional X-ray sources.
Associated Beamline: TOMCAT (TOmographic Microscopy and Coherent rAdiology experimenTs)
Scientific Highlights
Cause of clogged hypodermic needles discovered
Researchers at PSI and the ANAXAM technology transfer center have found the cause of clogging in prefilled syringes.
3D insights into an innovative manufacturing process
3D printing for creating complex shapes
Earlier detection of breast cancer
3D X-rays can improve breast cancer screening.
X-ray imaging after heart transplantations
Synchrotron light can be used in follow-up after a heart transplant to determine whether the body may be rejecting the new organ.
S-TOMCAT beamline receives first X-ray light
On June 25th 2025, the S-TOMCAT beamline shutters were opened to receive first X-ray light from the new SLS 2.0 storage ring.
First vacuum-gas-controlled metal assisted chemical etching at 8-inch wafer scale
Our microfabrication team at Paul Scherrer Institut and the research institute Fraunhofer ENAS recently started a research cooperation in the field of gas-phase metal assisted chemical etching (MACE, MacEtch) technologies, supported by memsstar Ltd. Already in the early stages of the collaboration, the research team achieved very promising results with huge aspect ratio (at least 500:1) silicon nanowires, indicating an incredible development potential.
Bryan Benz awarded best talk at MNE 2024
Bryan Benz was awarded the conference’s best oral presentation at the 50th International Micro and Nano Engineering Conference (MNE 2024) for his talk entitled “High aspect ratio (1:500) silicon nanowires for force sensing”.
TOMCAT attends XNPIG2024, bags two awards
A TOMCAT delegation attended the 6th International Conference on X-ray and Neutron Phase Imaging with Gratings (XNPIG2024) held on 8-12 April, 2024 in Shenzhen, China. The team delivered a series of two invited talks and seven contributed talks, all of which were well-received by the conference attendees. Two team members were selected for their outstanding contributions: Simon Spindler was awarded one of the Best Poster Prizes for his recent work on “Diffraction Beamlets” while Stefano van Gogh was the co-recipient of the W.H.F. Talbot Award, in recognition of his outstanding PhD thesis.