Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2020
There has been much interest in the last few years in the technique for focusing x-rays into high intensity spots using tapered glass capillaries or other forms of grazing incident x-ray reflectors. The resulting microbeams have been used in applications that include microfluorescence, microdiffraction, tomography and lithography. Instead of focusing x-rays to a spot, a collimating optic can be used to capture x-rays from a point source and turn them into a collimated parallel beam at the exit aperture to the optic. Kirkland et. al. have pointed out that the use of such an optic could provide enhanced detection sensitivity in wavelength dispersive spectroscopy.
We have developed a grazing incidence collimating x-ray optic that can be coupled to a simple wavelength dispersive spectrometer (WDS). This combined instrument was designed to enhance the intensity of x-rays from a sample by an order of magnitude or more in the energy range of 0 to 1 keV compared to a conventional WDS.