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The development of parabolic refractive x-ray lenses has opened new possibilities for hard x-ray microscopy and microanalysis at synchrotron radiation sources. Using aluminium, we have fabricated parabolic refractive xray lenses of high quality that are used for distortion free, magnifying imaging with sub-micrometer resolution. Combined with tomographic techniques, this allows one to reconstruct the three-dimensional inner structure of a sample at sub-micrometer resolution with minimal sample preparation. The lenses can be used to image the synchrotron radiation source onto a sample in a reducing geometry, generating an intensive hard x-ray microbeam at the sample position. The microbeam allows one to perform hard x-ray analytical techniques with a spatial resolution in the micrometer and sub-micrometer range, such as fluorescence and absorption spectroscopy, diffraction, or small angle scattering. Recently, we have succeeded to make parabolic refractive xray lenses of beryllium. These lenses are more than one order of magnitude more transparent for hard x-rays than aluminium lenses. In addition, they have a larger aperture that can lead to a higher resolution (down to 50nm) and a larger field of view (about 1mm) in imaging experiments. The beryllium lenses have been characterized in first experiments. Their optical performance is compared to that of the aluminium lenses.

We have developed an ultra-fast multi-channel time-to-digital converter (mC-TDC). The mC-TDC electronics is used to read out the delay-line-based 2-D detectors of the neutron diffractometer and reflectometer TriCS and AMOR, respectively. The high time resolution of the mC-TDC (≈ 145 ps) allows the conversion of the positionsensitive detector signals into accurate 2-D scattering coordinates (≈ 2 × 2 mm 2 ). The mC-TDC also generates lowjitter time-of-flight signals and incorporates an efficient twostage pileup-rejection mechanism. Neutron rates exceeding 100 000 cps can be processed.