Argonne scientists create chatty X-ray microscope that zooms in where you tell it to

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have plugged an agentic AI platform into an X-ray nanoprobe beamline, creating a system that can get a closer look at areas researchers ask it to focus on. Argonne reported the success of an experimental run of the agentic microscope this week, with the device initially tested on its ability to locate the interface between two regions on an integrated circuit device, and all by just telling the microscope what they wanted it to determine using natural language. “Microelectronics was simply the example used to showcase the technology,” Argonne computational scientist Mathew Cherukara said of the project. “The real achievement is developing a next‑generation, AI‑enhanced microscope that can benefit many scientific fields.” The microscope itself is part of Argonne’s 26-ID hard X-ray nanoprobe beamline, which uses a tightly focused X-ray beam to perform nanoscale imaging and measurements of target samples. …