Preface

Résumé
This volume is the proceedings of the 7th X-ray microscopy conference, hosted by the ESRF, in Grenoble, from July 28th to August 2nd 2002. This triennial conference is the latest in a series of several conferences held successively in Gottingen (1983), Brookhaven (1987), London (1990), Chemogolovka (1993), Wurzburg (1996) and Berkeley (1999). The meeting series has become the principal international forum for the presentation and discussion of advances in high-spatial-resolution X-ray imaging and its applications across a broad range of sciences. XRM2002 was jointly supported by the ESRF, LURE and SOLEIL and attracted 239 participants from 18 nations.

In addition to providing the latest information on X-ray microscopy techniques, the programme was chosen to emphasise scientific accomplishments from various fields such as Biology, Earth Sciences, Materials Science, and Environmental Sciences. Both, the participation of 50 registered PhD students and the submission of more than 190 abstracts confirmed the rapid growth of the X-ray microscopy community. The 5-day conference featured 12 oral sessions and 3 poster sessions covering three generic areas: X-ray microscopy instrumentation, Applications, and Methods and Novel Approaches.

This book contains 150 reviews and status reports and closely reflects the progress of all the X-ray microscopy related fields. Papers are arbitrarily sorted by topical sections but an index gives also the correspondence with the original conference programme. The three first sections cover instrumental developments in X-ray microscopy and report on synchrotron facilities and new instruments (24 papers), laboratory instruments and compact sources (12 papers), and finally on X-ray optics (28 papers). The next five chapters are concerned with applications of X-ray microscopy related techniques and present contributions on biological and medical sciences (20 papers), earth and planetary sciences (8 papers) environmental and soils sciences (12 papers), materials and surface sciences (15 papers), and archeometry (2 papers). Finally, the two last chapters are devoted to new methods and coherent imaging (18 papers) and data processing and software developments (9 papers), respectively. Because of the large number of contributions, the length of the papers was strictly limited and, while most of them can be directly identified with conference presentations, in a few cases papers on similar topics were combined.