An X-ray machine at the dentist's office takes a single flat image of a tooth. But if you need to see the insides of a microchip from all sides, you have to take the sample to a synchrotron — an accelerator the size of a football field. Hybrid photon detectors are changing that picture: they catch each X-ray quantum individually, like a digital camera catches light, and turn it into an electrical signal.

Optical microscopy can't see through metal, and ordinary X-rays can't distinguish details smaller than a micron. A hybrid detector solves both problems: a sensor layer absorbs the X-rays, and an electronics layer immediately reads the signal. As a result, on a lab bench, the team managed to collect 40 times more photons per shot and complete the entire scan 20 times faster than the same group had done before. The result is an 800-fold speedup.

Image quality was checked in three ways: how sharply fine details are rendered, how consistent repeated scans are, and how contrasty the wires look against the substrate. All metrics confirmed that the imaging parameters were chosen correctly, and even now, without further improvements, the tomograph can distinguish microchip features at the limits of laboratory X-ray capabilities.