A visibility optimization study for grating-based X-ray Phase Contrast Imaging

An X-ray phase contrast grating interferometer consists of three gratings in the beam line to generate interference patterns and acquire phase shift information if an object is placed into the beam. These gratings have a pitch of a few micrometers and therefore very accurate alignment is needed to acquire phase information reliably. In this work we have investigated different setup parameters and environmental influences on the detected signal quality by Six Sigma methods. We have used this information to optimize our setup and established a semi-automatic alignment procedure to reproduce a stable signal quality.