Powder diffraction computed tomography: a combined synchrotron and neutron study.

Diffraction and imaging using X-rays and neutrons are widely utilized in different fields of engineering, biology, chemistry and/or materials science. The additional information gained from the diffraction signal by X-ray diffraction and computed tomography (XRD-CT) can give this method a distinct advantage in materials science applications compared to classical tomography. Its active development over the last decade revealed structural details in a non-destructive way with unprecedented sensitivity. In the current contribution an attempt to adopt the well-established XRD-CT technique for neutron diffraction computed tomography (ND-CT) is reported. A specially designed "phantom", an object displaying adaptable contrast sufficient for both XRD-CT and ND-CT, was used for method validation. The feasibility of ND-CT is demonstrated, and it is also shown that the ND-CT technique is capable to provide a non-destructive view into the interior of the "phantom" delivering structural information consistent with a reference XRD-CT experiment.