Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology

An electron-beam deposition method is used to fabricate spherical and flat mirrors with a peak reflectivity of 20% for wavelengths between 120 and 450 Å. It is experimentally shown that the fabricated mirrors can be employed to form an image with a resolution of 1 μm for ultrasoft x rays. The possibility of producing intense directional high-temperature plasma radiation by spherical multilayer mirrors is demonstrated. A radiation intensity of 10⁷ W/cm² around 182 Å has been experimentally obtained in the laser plasma image plane.

The advantages of the use of x-ray microtomography in materials science are discussed, and illustrated by the nondestructive study of the mechanical damage in a continuous fiber SiC/Al composite at a resolution of about 25 μm. A laboratory x-ray source was used, and it was shown that quantitative measurements of the linear absorption coefficient at this resolution are possible, even though the AgKα radiation used is accompanied by a considerable amount of white radiation, provided that the counter system is properly corrected for pulse pile up and dead-time.

Gold pinhole transmission gratings fabricated by Heidenhain GmbH primarily for the purpose of studying the radiation of intense soft x-ray sources have been tested with the synchrotron radiation of BESSY. Typical results for the spectral dependence of the grating efficiency into the various diffraction orders are presented in a wavelength region ranging from 4 to 20 nm. Also the influence of grating irregularities has been studied. With appropriate grating parameters quite good agreement between the experimental results and theoretical Calculations is Obtained.

An undulator-based beamline was built and commissioned at the National Synchrotron Light Source to provide tunable coherent radiation in the 200–800 eV range. The low emittance of the storage ring means that the undulator source has high brightness so that a large flux of coherent x rays is delivered to experimental stations. The beamline uses a horizontally dispersing bichromator that allows two experiments to run simultaneously, making use of the first and second harmonics of the undulator output. In addition, the use of horizontally deflecting optics enables the beamline alignment to be insensitive to electron beam motion since the horizontal electron beam size is quite large. The beamline and its performance are discussed with emphasis on the optics and on stability, radiation, and vacuum considerations.