Design of ultrashort Kirkpatrick-Baez mirror for soft x-ray nanofocusing

Abstract

X-ray focusing optics are essential for acquiring high-quality X-ray microscopy images. Fresnel zone plates (FZPs) are conventionally used to focus soft X-rays via diffraction. The use of Kirkpatrick-Baez (KB) mirrors for nanofocusing in the soft X-ray region is limited because a KB mirror is a reflective X-ray focusing optic that has a pair of perpendicular mirrors in a grazing-incidence configuration, which lowers the numerical aperture due to the long focal length. KB mirrors with a short focal length have been proposed for hard X-ray focusing. This paper presents the design of an ultrashort KB mirror for soft X-ray focusing that has an extremely short focal length, which is achieved by reducing its mirror length. Moreover, a large grazing angle is employed to utilize total-reflection-based focusing. An ultrashort KB mirror is proposed for pilot studies at beamline BL25SU-A, SPring-8, Japan. A ray-tracing simulator is used to determine the misalignment tolerance in terms of roll and yaw for each mirror in the KB geometry. Based on the results, a mirror manipulator and other equipment are designed to precisely position the mirrors. Although this strategy, commonly used for FZPs, leads to a short working distance and a small beam acceptance, we believe that it can be applied to ultrashort KB mirrors for X-ray microscopy applications with achromaticity and strong demagnification.