Combining flat crystals, bent crystals and compound refractive lenses for high-energy X-ray optics.

Abstract

Compound refractive lenses (CRLs) are effective for collimating or focusing high-energy X-ray beams (50-100 keV) and can be used in conjunction with crystal optics in a variety of configurations, as demonstrated at the 1-ID undulator beamline of the Advanced Photon Source. As a primary example, this article describes the quadrupling of the output flux when a collimating CRL, composed of cylindrical holes in aluminium, is inserted between two successive monochromators, i.e. a modest-energy-resolution premonochromator followed by a high-resolution monochromator. The premonochromator is a cryogenically cooled divergence-preserving bent double-Laue Si(111) crystal device delivering an energy width DeltaE/E approximately 10(-3), which is sufficient for most experiments. The high-resolution monochromator is a four-reflection flat Si(111) crystal system resembling two channel-cuts in a dispersive arrangement, reducing the bandwidth to less than 10(-4), as required for some applications. Tests with 67 and 81 keV photon energies show that the high-resolution monochromator, having a narrow angular acceptance of a few microradians, exhibits a fourfold throughput enhancement due to the insertion of a CRL that reduces the premonochromatized beam's vertical divergence from 29 micro rad to a few microradians. The ability to focus high-energy X-rays with CRLs having long focal lengths (tens of meters) is also shown by creating a line focus of 70-90 micro m beam height in the beamline end-station with both the modest-energy-resolution and the high-energy-resolution monochromatic X-rays.