The structure of crystalline materials is typically organised hierarchically on several length scales. Hard x-ray microscopy is presented as a collection of modalities that allows to zoom into a mm-sized sample to acquire 3D maps of any embedded region and at essentially all relevant length scales. For coarse mapping of grains, their orientations and average stress state diffraction based tomography methods can sample thousands of grains with a resolution of 2 µm. At the 100 nm scale, domains and dislocations and their associated strain fields can be visualised by diffraction microscopy. Similar to dark field electron microscopy, diffraction and imaging can be combined in several ways. For the ultimate resolution, a bulk version of coherent diffraction imaging is introduced. Hard x-ray microscopy is optimised for acquisition of 3D movies: directly visualising the structural changes during nucleation and growth, deformation or damage. The state of art is provided along with examples of use. I discuss how hard x-ray microscopy studies can enable the formulation and validation of improved multiscale models that account for the entire heterogeneity of materials.

晶体材料的结构通常在几个长度尺度上分级组织。硬X射线显微术是一组模态，可以放大到一个mm大小的样品中，以获取所有嵌入区域的3D图，并且基本上以所有相关的长度标尺显示。对于晶粒的粗略分布图，其取向和基于平均应力状态衍射的层析成像方法可以对数千个晶粒进行采样，分辨率为2 µm。在100 nm尺度上，畴和位错及其相关的应变场可以通过衍射显微镜观察。类似于暗场电子显微镜，衍射和成像可以多种方式组合。为了获得最高的分辨率，引入了批量版的相干衍射成像。硬X射线显微镜经过优化，可用于采集3D电影：直接可视化成核和生长，变形或损坏过程中的结构变化。提供了现有技术以及使用示例。我讨论了硬X射线显微镜研究如何能够实现改进的多尺度模型的制定和验证，这些模型涵盖了材料的整个异质性。