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A novel high-quality custom-made macroscope optics, dedicated to high-resolution time-resolved X-ray tomographic microscopy at the TOMCAT beamline at the Swiss Light Source (Paul Scherrer Institut, Switzerland), is introduced. The macroscope offers 4× magnification, has a very high numerical aperture of 0.35 and it is modular and highly flexible. It can be mounted both in a horizontal and vertical configuration, enabling imaging of tall samples close to the scintillator, to avoid edge-enhancement artefacts. The macroscope performance was characterized and compared with two existing in-house imaging setups, one dedicated to high spatial and one to high temporal resolution. The novel macroscope shows superior performance for both imaging settings compared with the previous systems. For the time-resolved setup, the macroscope is 4 times more efficient than the previous system and, at the same time, the spatial resolution is also increased by a factor of 6. For the high-spatial-resolution setup, the macroscope is up to 8.5 times more efficient with a moderate spatial resolution improvement (factor of 1.5). This high efficiency, increased spatial resolution and very high image quality offered by the novel macroscope optics will make 10–20 Hz high-resolution tomographic studies routinely possible, unlocking unprecedented possibilities for the tomographic investigations of dynamic processes and radiation-sensitive samples.

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