Victoria CEO Phillipe Harners reported that while the flooring sector is experiencing the most severe and longest decline in demand in the last 30 years, the company is optimizing productivity and reducing operational costs while maintaining production capacity to prepare for future demand. 

Flooring manufacturer Dixie Group continued investing in digital marketing and in-store merchandising during the third quarter but, like many in the flooring industry, faced headwinds from high interest rates, low home sales, and weak consumer confidence.

With software upgrades, users should not have to relearn what they already know--and user interfaces need to be constructed with the end user in mind.

Heat seal coating specialist Sappi Rockwell Solutions has launched a recyclable, lightweight, heat seal lidding film designed for the fresh produce market.

The company has divested its gripper business assets to the Schmalz Group to focus its resources and expertise on advancing the commercialization of its end-to-end visual AI solutions.

Introduction

Arm architects the pervasive intelligence that is transforming our daily experience. Arm-based chips and device architectures orchestrate the performance of the technology that makes modern life possible.Arm designs the technology which is at the heart of advanced digital products, from wireless, networking and consumer entertainment solutions to imaging, automotive, security and storage devices. Arm improves people’s lives by enabling the intelligence in affordable, easy-to-use electronic products that transform the way we live and work. We work in partnership with a global network of leading technology companies which are using our smart low-power technology. Together we are shaping the future of a better world.

Today, We are well recognized as the market leader in the CPU and System IP industry and this has been achieved by consistently delivering reliable and high-quality IP products. The cost of design and manufacturing and that warrants “right first time” approach for all IP and System products by our partners. Time-to-market is critical for our partners to deal with fierce competition in the marketplace, being first would enable them to get premium value from the end products. In this context, Design Verification of CPU IPs is a big challenge requiring an engineering skillset that is both broad and deep.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class.

Are you highly inquisitive with a committed approach to improving performance? Do you want to make an impact on the future of Smartphone and Laptop computing?
We are looking for experienced engineers with a strong understanding of computer architecture and performance analysis to investigate emerging use-cases such as AR and ML to help define future IP from Arm and our partners.

About the role

As a senior member of the engineering team within the Client Line of Business you will lead performance analysis investigations, producing data-led analysis and conclusions which help define requirements for future Client compute solutions.
Client computing devices are expected to deliver incredible performance across an increasing range of diverse use cases including AAA quality gaming, compelling AR experiences and applications with deeply embedded AI and ML.
You will use your knowledge of hardware and software to build a deep understanding of critical use cases. You will look at how workloads utilise available compute and memory resources, how advancements in SoC topologies, processor design and software will help improve user experience.

We are looking for an enthusiastic software developer with understanding of Java or modern C++, to join the Arm Mobile Studio team.

The role involves collaborating with highly motivated developers from different backgrounds, and customers throughout the world, to craft the next generation of our performance analysis tools for Arm CPUs and Mali GPUs. As part of this team, you would help create new features, maintain existing ones, and support the engineering infrastructure for build, test, and continuous integration. We also help to support both internal and external customers, and contribute to our developer documentation, developer website, and community forums.

We are growing the team to help deliver features that support the full breadth of Arm's product portfolio. Our tools are used to optimize the latest smart cars, drones, mobile games, and machine learning applications, your ideas will make a difference and help to bring world-beating products to market.

Please note this is a Fixed Term Contract ending Sept 2021

We are looking for a highly skilled, technically capable senior software engineer to join the team of Arm Forge at Warwick. You will be passionate about making a difference through building great quality products.

As an experienced developer, you’ll have a methodical approach to debugging and performance analysis and understand how developers will use our tools to achieve their objectives. Working as part of a team of C++ software engineers based in Warwick you will help to develop the Arm Forge Debug and Profiling tools.

Arm Forge is used by developers to increase software performance or fix software bugs from single Linux servers right up to the largest supercomputer on the planet.  Our tools span a wide range of use cases; from C/C++/Python developers writing multithreaded server applications or ML and data analysis applications, to C/C++/Fortran/Python HPC developers scaling to millions of cores.

To learn more about our group and the products please check https://developer.arm.com/hpc.

Main Duties

We are looking for a highly skilled and motivated senior software engineer who is passionate about producing quality valuable software to join our elite team based in Warwick.

• Responsible for developing quality functionality on schedule, including specification, design, development, documentation and test.
• Drive forward major features or improvements and increase quality into the product.
• Expected to integrate with existing ARM process and infrastructure where possible and use your experience to introduce new processes where required.

About the role

We are searching for a talented Software Engineer to join the Raven Random Test Generator team at the Arm Austin Design Center. As a Software Engineer on our team, you will help develop and deploy our core product, Raven – a powerful dynamic random test generator written in C++ that has been used extensively by CPU design teams throughout the Arm ecosystem for more than a decade. You will work in close collaboration with senior CPU verification engineers both inside and outside of Arm to define and develop new ways of achieving their verification goals.

The Raven team is part of Arm’s Architecture & Technology Group – the part of Arm that develops architectural specifications and technologies needed to support Arm’s partners in successful development of processors conforming to the architecture. In addition to our product for CPU verification groups, we also collaborate early and frequently with Arm’s architects to help ensure that new architectures can be verified effectively.

As a member of our team, your day-to-day work will consist primarily of design and development of our C++ tool and supporting customers and coworkers to solve verification problems. This work relies heavily upon a strong knowledge of computer architecture concepts and ability to read and understand new architectural specifications. If you are looking for a role that combines hardware and software skills in an environment where you can make a significant contribution and collaborate with a talented team that creates leading-edge verification technologies and methodologies, we’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Arm is seeking highly motivated and creative undergraduates to join our Cambridge, Manchester, and Sheffield-based teams working on state-of-the-art software.

In your cover letter please specify which year you will be graduating.

Our software supports a whole ecosystem, from embedded firmware through operating system kernels, compilers, libraries, developer tools, applications, and web technologies. We work in the open-source community, build tools to support our internal processes, and create commercial software products. Whatever your focus in software engineering, Arm will help you to grow your skills whilst working on projects that drive technology forward for our billions of end-users.[

Arm's Machine Learning Group is seeking for a highly motivated and creative Graduate Software Engineer to join the Cambridge-based applied ML team.

From research, to proof-of-concept development, to deployment on ARM IPs, joining this team, would be a phenomenal opportunity to contribute to the full life-cycle of machine learning projects and understand how state-of-the-art machine learning is used to solve real word problems.

Working closely with field experts in a truly multi-discipline environment, you will have the chance to explore existing or build new machine learning techniques, while helping unpick the complex world of use-cases that are applied on high end mobile phones, TVs, and laptops.

About the role

Your role would be to understand, develope and implement these use case, collaborating with Arm's system architects, and working with our marketing groups to ensure multiple Arm products are molded to work well for machine learning. Also, experience deploying inference in a mobile or embedded environment would be ideal. Knowledge of the theory and concepts involved in ML is also needed, so fair comparisons of different approaches can be made.

As an in depth technical role, you will need to understand the complex applications you analyse in detail and communicate them in their simplest form to help include them in product designs, where you will be able to influence both IP and system architecture.

The SPE (Sales and Partner Enablement) Infrastructure team at Arm is looking for a hardworking and enthusiastic graduate to join our team based in Cambridge with an ambition to become a crucial member of the team.

We combine people, technology and domain specific knowledge to craft tools, services and infrastructure for Arm workforce that improve their productivity. It can be challenging at times, but there are many opportunities for people who take pride in, and enjoy developing these services and systems to make a real difference. 

You will join our established team in working closely with the Sales, Technical Communications and the Arm customer support team to provide them with the tools they need to ensure the success of Arm's partners.

The Role

You will have a chance to work across a range of systems, services and tools, focusing on developing, maintaining, and running the continuous integration and testing infrastructure of our tools. This will include bespoke and third-party solutions. You will be adept at scripting, designing automated tests, and have a track record of picking up and working with different technologies, for example:

• XML, DITA CMS
• XSLT
• XPath
• JSON, YAML, Markdown
• Java
• The Document Object Model
• Systems integration using REST APIs
• Jenkins
• Azure Cloud

Key Accountabilities/Responsibilities

As a key member of a small team of engineers, you will engage with team leadership, project management, and other teams in Arm to deliver high-impact improvements and new functionality to our existing tools and code infrastructure. We use CI / CD pipelines to accommodate auto-generated documentation and varied working practises of our documentation teams across Arm, as well as more traditional CMS offerings. Your primary focus will be on the continuous integration and testing infrastructure, but you will contribute to all aspects of software development within the team; you will get involved in developing / supporting the tools used by the Sales and Application Engineering teams, Linux system administration and technical consulting with other teams in Arm to support requirement and solution definition.

About the role

We are looking for enthusiastic Graduate Electronics or Embedded System Engineer to join Arm’s Hardware Platform team, who are working at the forefront of embedded design based around Arm IP products. We are responsible for

• Designing and releasing the latest Arm IP technologies in FPGA image, enabling pre-silicon software and ecosystem development, reducing time to market.
• Creating physical hardware development platforms, based around Arm’s custom system-on-chip (SoC) and FPGAs for software development and validation activities for both our external partners/customers and our internal development teams.

If you’re interested in:

• The potential to work on all aspects of product development, from specification to customer release.
• Eager to learn, a willingness to work across disciplines.
• The challenges of bringing up a new development board.
•  

Creating and validating Verilog RTL design in FPGA.

• Gaining a deeper understanding of system architecture and performance.
• Working alongside many other teams including system architects, CPU / System IP designers, physical chip layout / packaging engineers.
• Interaction with Arm’s partners and customers both through the support organisation and directly.

Then we have a role for you!

What will I be accountable for?

As a Graduate, you will be placed in a development team at Arm’s offices in Cambridge, UK where you will have a mentor, and be able to get to grips with the problems ranging across many hardware and software areas.  You will be working across all aspects of the product lifecycle whilst being supported by and learning from the rest of the team.

About the role

We are looking for enthusiastic Graduate Electronics or Embedded System Engineer to join Arm’s Hardware Platform team, who are working at the forefront in the following embedded areas:

• Development and validation of physical hardware platforms, based around Arm’s custom system-on-chip (SoC) and FPGAs.
• Creating software to test Arm systems both in simulation and in hardware (FPGA & Silicon)
• Porting existing simulation/emulation RTL validation software to real hardware
• Create and maintain Build environments & Automation tooling to ensure we supply high quality products
• Software design and implementation of reference firmware for Arm processors and systems – for example working on the software to enable our cutting-edge CoreLink secure subsystems
• Software stack development to enable Arm IP. This includes implementing HALs, drivers, connectivity, security, power and control components
• Board support firmware using STM32 and LPC11 microcontrollers
• Operating system development (Linux, mbedOS, FreeRTOS, etc)
• Development of reference software and demos for Arm Partners to use and replicate in their own products.
• Support and maintenance

If you’re interested in:

• The potential to work on all aspects of product development, from specification to customer release.
• Eager to learn, willing to give anything a go.
• The challenges of bringing up a new development board.
• How to build, test and debug full software stacks on hardware that hasn’t yet been manufactured
• Gaining a deeper understanding of system architecture and performance
• Working alongside system hardware designers to develop the best platforms to support Arm’s partners

Then we have a role for you!

What will I be accountable for?

As a Graduate, you will be placed in a development team at Arm’s offices in Cambridge, UK where you will have a mentor, and be able to get to grips with the problems ranging across many software areas.  You will be working across all aspects of the software lifecycle whilst being supported by and learning from the rest of the team.  You will also be offered the opportunity to explore other teams within Arm during your first 12 months with us, as part of our Graduate Rotation programme.

Whilst a lot of our work does involve Open Source software, many tasks require working with development platforms, or simulated hardware environments where features are being developed and tested before the physical devices have been built, so the problems you will be expected to understand and solve are ones that are yet unknown to the general community.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class.

The Productivity Engineering group (PE) at ARM is responsible for ensuring our engineering teams have the tools and computational resources to succeed. PE is responsible for a range of best in class infrastructure elements for ensuring our designs meet our partners' needs, from maintaining ARM's compute cluster to deploying new design and verification methodologies.

Within PE, the Deployment Team is responsible for enabling all engineering teams with new capability improvements required to achieve the organizational change initiatives.

• Journey to Cloud – moving engineering workflows to cloud and onto Arm architecture hardware
• Machine Learning / Data Science to maximize verification compute efficiency
• Continuous Delivery for Hardware Engineering efficiency
• Machine Readable Specifications for Hardware Engineering efficiency

As a member of the centralized Deployment Team, you will develop expertise with the mechanics such that through a partnership with project teams you can deploy a turn key solution. The Deployment Team members need to be both capable engineers and good at working in partnership with other ARM engineering teams.

The activities for this role demand an enthusiastic candidate from either Computer Science or Electrical/Electronics Engineering background with a strong desire to constantly evolve a cross-disciplinary skill set, in particular:
• Design and development of workflow scripts, with result capture and visualization tools
• Collaboration with RTL design and verification engineers to create new point techniques
• Develop automation and flow abstraction methods to enable project team to focus on the application of new capabilities rather than the mechanics.

As a member of a small and dynamic team, you will be working alongside engineers at all our design centers and contributing to the CPU, GPU and interconnect IP at the heart of ARM's success.

Concurrency architecture verification engineer

Are you interested in concurrency, CPU design, and verification? Then we have just the opportunity for you.

Arm uses innovative tools [1] for modelling and reasoning about concurrency in our products. 

Those tools serve different purposes, such as: clarifying our architecture specification [2], communicating with our partners, and enabling verification of our CPU hardware designs.

This last point is at the intersection of architectural specification and CPU hardware design, which is where your role would be.

We seek to encourage interaction between those activities within Arm and beyond: by working hand in hand with architects and CPU verification teams to understand their requirements, you will improve our methodology and tools. You will also be in charge of inventing and prototyping new ways to verify pre-silicon designs.

This is an outstanding opportunity if you are interested in:

• developing open-source tools [3] which benefit the Arm ecosystem and wider communities such as language standard committees, compiler and kernel developers;
• furthering the understanding of an area that has been the subject of intense research in the last decade;
• demonstrating the impact of formal models on industrial products.

Our tools are written in Ocaml and C; knowing those languages would be ideal, as well as a working knowledge of Linux, git and RTL.

See also:

[1] https://developer.arm.com/architectures/cpu-architecture/a-profile/memory-model-tool

[2] https://developer.arm.com/docs/ddi0487/latest/arm-architecture-reference-manual-armv8-for-armv8-a-architecture-profile

[3] http://diy.inria.fr

[4] https://github.com/herd/herdtools7/

Arm has a range of vacancies for enthusiastic graduates with a passion for embedded software development, Open Source software and CPU Architecture. If you have a software background and a willingness to learn, you will be considered for work in one of these areas:

• Software design and implementation of features for our reference Mali Graphics processors (enabling our next generation Mali mobile IPs for APIs such as GLES, Vulkan, OpenCL, EGL) on Android
• Compiler development using LLVM for GPGPU kernels
• Compiler development including open source compilation technology for e.g. Apache TVM targeting Arm's CPUs, GPUs and NPUs.
• Improvements and performance optimisations for Arm Compute Library and ArmNN.
• Model Conditioning and sophisticated machine language framework optimisations in frameworks like Tensorflow and Pytorch.
• Performance analysis of NPUs, GPUs or CPUs
• Arm Secure Firmware development
• Software stack development to enable Arm IP.
• Operating system development (Linux, Zephyr, FreeRTOS, mbedOS, etc)
• Verification of Arm CPUs using full-stack operating system software
• Development of Software Tools for CPU Verification using Random Instruction Generation
• Software optimisation (JIT compilers, Android, ChromeOS, …)
• Build environments & Automation tooling

If you have an interest in CPU, GPU or NPU architecture and you are passionate about software, whether it’s kernel, driver, application or tools development; If you’d like to know more about how hardware and software interact, then this is an outstanding opportunity for you!

What will I be accountable for?

As a Graduate, you will be placed in a development team at Arm’s offices in Cambridge, UK where you will have a dedicated mentor, and be able to get to grips with the problems ranging across many software areas. You will work across all aspects of the software lifecycle whilst being supported by and learning from the rest of the team.

Whilst a lot of our work does involve Open Source software, many tasks require working with development platforms, or simulated hardware environments where features are being developed and tested before the physical devices have been built, so the problems you will be encouraged to understand and pursue are ones that are yet unknown to the general community.

Microsoft's Word program now recommends replacing the term "maternity leave" with more “inclusive” language.

PPDS, the exclusive global provider of Philips professional displays, has announced that Telelogos software has been approved as the very first remote device management solution for the new Philips Tableaux range of Advanced Colour ePaper displays.

Canalys's latest research reveals that the worldwide smartphone market fell by 10% to 258.2 million units in Q2 2023, showing a slowdown in decline.

Endor Labs, the open source software security solutions provider, has released The 2024 Dependency Management Report, which consolidates extensive original and third-party research into the current state of security in the software dependency lifecycle that represents the foundation for all application development.

Shipster, a custom shipping integration platform, and Futura Retail Solutions, an advanced retail and warehouse management software, have announced a strategic partnership to target growing omni-channel retail markets.

The number of POS software installations at major retail and hospitality operators worldwide surpassed 9 million as of June 2023, according to a new study from strategic research and consulting firm RBR Data Services, a division of Datos Insights.

Competition between vendors to provide POS software remains fierce, with more than 125 suppliers working with major retail and hospitality chains, according to Global POS Software 2023, the latest study from strategic research and consulting firm RBR Data Services, a division of Datos Insights.

By Brad Hyett, CEO at phos.

SoftPoS, also known as Software Point of Sale, is a software-based solution enabling merchants to convert their NFC-enabled smartphones or tablets into functional payment terminals.

By Jeremy Landau, freelance writer.

Retail's dynamic environment is seeing a real shift, driven by the integration of advanced software solutions. This goes beyond a mere technological upgrade – it's about completely transforming the customer experience.

Nexi, the European PayTech, now enables merchants in Italy to accept in-person contactless payments seamlessly and securely with Tap to Pay on iPhone, and will continue to expand the availability of Tap to Pay on iPhone to its customers in Europe where the service is available.

GreyOrange Inc. has introduced SoftFence, a virtual shielding technology from its retail software as a service (SaaS) platform, gStore.

Efficient route planning is crucial for businesses to stay competitive and meet customer demands. Thankfully, there are several free routing software options available that can help streamline your business operations. Whether you're a small business owner or a logistics manager, these tools can be invaluable in optimizing your routes and maximizing productivity.

Update released for BGS open-source database software, ETL Helper  British Geological Survey

We present a demonstration of high-pressure grazing-incidence small-angle neutron scattering for soft matter thin films. The results suggest changes in water reorganization at different pressures.

AnACor2.0 significantly accelerates the calculation of analytical absorption corrections in long-wavelength crystallography, achieving up to 175× speed improvements. This enhancement is achieved through innovative sampling techniques, bisection and gridding methods, and optimized CUDA implementations, ensuring efficient and accurate results.

Here we describe TOMOMAN (TOMOgram MANager), an extensible open-sourced software package for handling cryo-electron tomography data preprocessing. TOMOMAN streamlines interoperability between a wide range of external packages and provides tools for project sharing and archival.

Analytical absorption corrections are employed in scaling diffraction data for highly absorbing samples, such as those used in long-wavelength crystallography, where empirical corrections pose a challenge. AnACor2.0 is an accelerated software package developed to calculate analytical absorption corrections. It accomplishes this by ray-tracing the paths of diffracted X-rays through a voxelized 3D model of the sample. Due to the computationally intensive nature of ray-tracing, the calculation of analytical absorption corrections for a given sample can be time consuming. Three experimental datasets (insulin at λ = 3.10 Å, thermolysin at λ = 3.53 Å and thaumatin at λ = 4.13 Å) were processed to investigate the effectiveness of the accelerated methods in AnACor2.0. These methods demonstrated a maximum reduction in execution time of up to 175× compared with previous methods. As a result, the absorption factor calculation for the insulin dataset can now be completed in less than 10 s. These acceleration methods combine sampling, which evaluates subsets of crystal voxels, with modifications to standard ray-tracing. The bisection method is used to find path lengths, reducing the complexity from O(n) to O(log2 n). The gridding method involves calculating a regular grid of diffraction paths and using interpolation to find an absorption correction for a specific reflection. Additionally, optimized and specifically designed CUDA implementations for NVIDIA GPUs are utilized to enhance performance. Evaluation of these methods using simulated and real datasets demonstrates that systematic sampling of the 3D model provides consistently accurate results with minimal variance across different sampling ratios. The mean difference of absorption factors from the full calculation (without sampling) is at most 2%. Additionally, the anomalous peak heights of sulfur atoms in the Fourier map show a mean difference of only 1% compared with the full calculation. This research refines and accelerates the process of analytical absorption corrections, introducing innovative sampling and computational techniques that significantly enhance efficiency while maintaining accurate results.

Grazing-incidence small-angle neutron scattering (GISANS) under pressure (HP-GISANS) at the solid (Si)–liquid (D2O) interface is demonstrated for the pressure-induced lateral morphological characterization of the nanostructure in thin (<100 nm) soft matter films. We demonstrate feasibility by investigating a hydrophobic {poly[(2,2,3,3,4,4,5,5-octafluoro)pentyl methacrylate]} (POFPMA)–hydrophilic {poly[2-(dimethylamino)ethyl methacrylate]} (PDMAEMA) brush mixture of strong incompatibility between the homopolymers, anchored on Si, at T = 45°C for two pressures, P = 1 bar and P = 800 bar. Our GISANS results reveal nanostructural rearrangements with increasing P, underlining P-induced effects in tethered polymer brush layers swollen with bulk solvent.

In recent years, China's advanced light sources have entered a period of rapid construction and development. As modern X-ray detectors and data acquisition technologies advance, these facilities are expected to generate massive volumes of data annually, presenting significant challenges in data management and utilization. These challenges encompass data storage, metadata handling, data transfer and user data access. In response, the Data Organization Management Access Software (DOMAS) has been designed as a framework to address these issues. DOMAS encapsulates four fundamental modules of data management software, including metadata catalogue, metadata acquisition, data transfer and data service. For light source facilities, building a data management system only requires parameter configuration and minimal code development within DOMAS. This paper firstly discusses the development of advanced light sources in China and the associated demands and challenges in data management, prompting a reconsideration of data management software framework design. It then outlines the architecture of the framework, detailing its components and functions. Lastly, it highlights the application progress and effectiveness of DOMAS when deployed for the High Energy Photon Source (HEPS) and Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility (BSRF).

X-ray ptychography is a coherent diffraction imaging technique based on acquiring multiple diffraction patterns obtained through the illumination of the sample at different partially overlapping probe positions. The diffraction patterns collected are used to retrieve the complex transmittivity function of the sample and the probe using a phase retrieval algorithm. Absorption or phase contrast images of the sample as well as the real and imaginary parts of the probe function can be obtained. Furthermore, X-ray ptychography can also provide spectral information of the sample from absorption or phase shift images by capturing multiple ptychographic projections at varying energies around the resonant energy of the element of interest. However, post-processing of the images is required to extract the spectra. To facilitate this, ProSPyX, a Python package that offers the analysis tools and a graphical user interface required to process spectral ptychography datasets, is presented. Using the PyQt5 Python open-source module for development and design, the software facilitates extraction of absorption and phase spectral information from spectral ptychographic datasets. It also saves the spectra in file formats compatible with other X-ray absorption spectroscopy data analysis software tools, streamlining integration into existing spectroscopic data analysis pipelines. To illustrate its capabilities, ProSPyX was applied to process the spectral ptychography dataset recently acquired on a nickel wire at the SWING beamline of the SOLEIL synchrotron.

Calculations and measurements of polarization-dependent soft X-ray scattering intensity are presented during a magnetic hysteresis cycle. It is confirmed that the dependence of the intensity on the magnetic moment can be linear, quadratic or a combination of both, depending on the polarization of the incident X-ray beam and the direction of the magnetic moment. With a linearly polarized beam, the scattered intensity will have a purely quadratic dependence on the magnetic moment when the magnetic moment is parallel to the scattering plane. However, with the magnetic moment perpendicular to the scattering plane, there is also a linear component. This means that, when measuring the hysteresis with linear polarization during a hysteresis cycle, the intensity will be an even function of the applied field when the change in the magnetic moment (and field) is confined within the scattering plane but becomes more complicated when the magnetic moment is out of the scattering plane. Furthermore, with circular polarization, the dependence of the scattered intensity on the moment is a combination of linear and quadratic. With the moment parallel to the scattering plane, the linear component changes with the helicity of the incident beam. Surprisingly, in stark contrast to absorption studies, even when the magnetic moment is perpendicular to the scattering plane there is still a dependence on the moment with a linear component. This linear component is completely independent of the helicity of the beam, meaning that the hysteresis loops will not be inverted with helicity.

Experimental characterization of the structural, electronic and dynamic properties of dilute systems in aqueous solvents, such as nanoparticles, molecules and proteins, are nowadays an open challenge. X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is probably one of the most established approaches to this aim as it is element-specific. However, typical dilute systems of interest are often composed of light elements that require extreme-ultraviolet to soft X-ray photons. In this spectral regime, water and other solvents are rather opaque, thus demanding radical reduction of the solvent volume and removal of the liquid to minimize background absorption. Here, we present an experimental endstation designed to operate a liquid flat jet of sub-micrometre thickness in a vacuum environment compatible with extreme ultraviolet/soft XAS measurements in transmission geometry. The apparatus developed can be easily connected to synchrotron and free-electron-laser user-facility beamlines dedicated to XAS experiments. The conditions for stable generation and control of the liquid flat jet are analyzed and discussed. Preliminary soft XAS measurements on some test solutions are shown.

Improving the scalability of tissue imaging throughput with bright, coherent X-rays requires identifying and mitigating artifacts resulting from the interactions between X-rays and matter. At synchrotron sources, long-term imaging of soft tissues in solution can result in gas bubble formation or cavitation, which dramatically compromises image quality and integrity of the samples. By combining in-line phase-contrast imaging with gas chromatography in real time, we were able to track the onset and evolution of high-energy X-ray-induced gas bubbles in ethanol-embedded soft tissue samples for tens of minutes (two to three times the typical scan times). We demonstrate quantitatively that vacuum degassing of the sample during preparation can significantly delay bubble formation, offering up to a twofold improvement in dose tolerance, depending on the tissue type. However, once nucleated, bubble growth is faster in degassed than undegassed samples, indicating their distinct metastable states at bubble onset. Gas chromatography analysis shows increased solvent vaporization concurrent with bubble formation, yet the quantities of dissolved gasses remain unchanged. By coupling features extracted from the radiographs with computational analysis of bubble characteristics, we uncover dose-controlled kinetics and nucleation site-specific growth. These hallmark signatures provide quantitative constraints on the driving mechanisms of bubble formation and growth. Overall, the observations highlight bubble formation as a critical yet often overlooked hurdle in upscaling X-ray imaging for biological tissues and soft materials and we offer an empirical foundation for their understanding and imaging protocol optimization. More importantly, our approaches establish a top-down scheme to decipher the complex, multiscale radiation–matter interactions in these applications.

A reliable `in situ' method for wavefront sensing in the soft X-ray domain is reported, developed for the characterization of rotationally symmetric optical elements, like an ellipsoidal mirror shell. In a laboratory setup, the mirror sample is irradiated by an electron-excited (4.4 keV), micrometre-sized (∼2 µm) fluorescence source (carbon Kα, 277 eV). Substantially, the three-dimensional intensity distribution I(r) is recorded by a CCD camera (2048 × 512 pixels of 13.5 µm) at two positions along the optical axis, symmetrically displaced by ±21–25% from the focus. The transport-of-intensity equation is interpreted in a geometrical sense from plane to plane and implemented as a ray tracing code, to retrieve the phase Φ(r) from the radial intensity gradient on a sub-pixel scale. For reasons of statistical reliability, five intra-/extra-focal CCD image pairs are evaluated and averaged to an annular two-dimensional map of the wavefront error {cal W}. In units of the test wavelength (C Kα), an r.m.s. value sigma_{cal{W}} = ±10.9λ0 and a peak-to-valley amplitude of ±31.3λ0 are obtained. By means of the wavefront, the focus is first reconstructed with a result for its diameter of 38.4 µm, close to the direct experimental observation of 39.4 µm (FWHM). Secondly, figure and slope errors of the ellipsoid are characterized with an average of ±1.14 µm and ±8.8 arcsec (r.m.s.), respectively, the latter in reasonable agreement with the measured focal intensity distribution. The findings enable, amongst others, the precise alignment of axisymmetric X-ray mirrors or the design of a wavefront corrector for high-resolution X-ray science.

Two-directional beam-tracking (2DBT) is a method for phase-contrast imaging and tomography that uses an intensity modulator to structure the X-ray beam into an array of independent circular beamlets that are resolved by a high-resolution detector. It features isotropic spatial resolution, provides two-dimensional phase sensitivity, and enables the three-dimensional reconstructions of the refractive index decrement, δ, and the attenuation coefficient, μ. In this work, the angular sensitivity and the spatial resolution of 2DBT images in a synchrotron-based implementation is reported. In its best configuration, angular sensitivities of ∼20 nrad and spatial resolution of at least 6.25 µm in phase-contrast images were obtained. Exemplar application to the three-dimensional imaging of soft tissue samples, including a mouse liver and a decellularized porcine dermis, is also demonstrated.

The Pohang Accelerator Laboratory X-ray Free-Electron Laser (PAL-XFEL) operates hard X-ray and soft X-ray beamlines for conducting scientific experiments providing intense ultrashort X-ray pulses based on the self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) process. The X-ray free-electron laser is characterized by strong pulse-to-pulse fluctuations resulting from the SASE process. Therefore, online photon diagnostics are very important for rigorous measurements. The concept of photo-absorption and emission using solid materials is seldom considered in soft X-ray beamline diagnostics. Instead, gas monitoring detectors, which utilize the photo-ionization of noble gas, are employed for monitoring the beam intensity. To track the beam position at the soft X-ray beamline in addition to those intensity monitors, an X-ray ionization beam position monitor (XIBPM) has been developed and characterized at the soft X-ray beamline of PAL-XFEL. The XIBPM utilizes ionization of either the residual gas in an ultra-high-vacuum environment or injected krypton gas, along with a microchannel plate with phosphor. The XIBPM was tested separately for monitoring horizontal and vertical beam positions, confirming the feasibility of tracking relative changes in beam position both on average and down to single-shot measurements. This paper presents the basic structure and test results of the newly developed non-invasive XIBPM.

A 1D imaging soft X-ray spectrometer installed on the small quantum systems (SQS) scientific instrument of the European XFEL is described. It uses movable cylindrical constant-line-spacing gratings in the Rowland configuration for energy dispersion in the vertical plane, and Wolter optics for simultaneous 1D imaging of the source in the horizontal plane. The soft X-ray fluorescence spectro-imaging capability will be exploited in pump–probe measurements and in investigations of propagation effects and other nonlinear phenomena.

The split-and-delay unit (SDU) at FLASH2 will be upgraded to enable the simultaneous operation of two temporally, spatially and spectrally separated probe beams when the free-electron laser undulators are operated in a two-color scheme. By means of suitable thin filters and an optical grating beam path a wide range of combinations of photon energies in the spectral range from 150 eV to 780 eV can be chosen. In this paper, simulations of the spectral transmission and performance parameters of the filter technique are discussed, along with a monochromator with dispersion compensation presently under construction.