Invited Speaker

Dr. Alexander Rack is scientist responsible for the X-ray imaging beamline ID19 of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility: X-ray optics characterisation, high-speed hard X-ray imaging, single-distance phase-retrieval, applications of microtomography, detector development. Applies high-speed imaging techniques including MHz radiography and rapid microtomography in combination with polychromatic synchrotron radiation to study fast events such as crack formation, spall or cavity collapse inside dense and opaque specimens. Develops indirect detection scheme in order to exploit the high spatio-temporal resolution available in synchrotron-based microimaging.

Alexander Rack, born in Berlin, Germany, studied Physics at the Technical University of Berlin and received his Dr.-Ing. from the same university in 2006 (Department Materials Processing). For the latter he received the Ernst-Eckhard-Koch price of the BESSY-II synchrotron light source (Berlin, Germany) in 2008. For his first post-doc position he joined the ANKA synchrotron light source (Karlsruhe, Germany) where he was in charge of synchrotron instrumentation for hard X-ray microimaging. In 2008 he moved to France to work at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble. Initially working at the micro-diffraction and microscopy beamline he soon joined the microtomography beamline ID19 which he is heading as responsible beamline scientist since 2016. Present research interests are the study of time-resolved phenomena by means of ultra-fast hard X-ray imaging which includes shock and crack propagation in dense matter as well as materials processing such as additive manufacturing. Since 2016 he is deputy group head of the Structure of Materials group of the ESRF.