Avilash Cramer

Introduction The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has led to a dramatic shortage of masks and other personal protective equipment in hospitals around the globe. One component of personal protective equipment, the disposable N95 face mask, is in particular demand.1,2 To alleviate a shortage of N95 masks, many methods to resterilize them have been proposed and studied.3 Any method for resterilizing masks must not degrade the filtration efficiency of the mask.

ABSTRACT The current COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic shortage of masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE) in hospitals around the globe [1]. One component of PPE that is in particular demand are disposable N95 face masks. To alleviate this, many methods of N95 mask sterilization have been studied and proposed with the hope of being able to safely reuse masks [2].

We demonstrate an x-ray source module consisting of a set of seven x-ray elements that can be turned on or off rapidly, in a programmable fashion, for distributed generation of x-rays from multiple points in space without any mechanical motion. The x-ray elements in this source module are miniature x-ray sources that are triggered by ultraviolet light. The UV light shining on a photocathode generates a small number of electrons by photo-emission. As depicted in Fig.