Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory have wired an AI system into one of the world's most powerful X-ray instruments. The result is a microscope that accepts plain-English instructions.

The setup sits at the 26-ID hard X-ray nanoprobe beamline of the Advanced Photon Source. Researchers simply tell it what to find. The AI steers the beam, gathers data, rebuilds images on the fly and decides where to look next.

In a test, scientists asked it to find the boundary between two regions on a scrap of integrated circuit. No manual beam positioning was needed. The AI scanned, analysed, zoomed and flagged spots for closer study.

The technique, called ptychography, generates millions of diffraction patterns in hours. Traditional reconstruction once took hours or days. Humans could not keep pace with the data flood.

Computational scientist Mathew Cherukara said microelectronics was only a test case. The real achievement is a next-generation AI-enhanced microscope that can serve many scientific fields.