Modelling phase imperfections in compound refractive lenses

Abstract

Compound refractive lenses (CRL) offer outstanding potential for probe formation in X-ray micro- and nano-analysis as well as for imaging applications, but effective aberration-free focusing of X-rays is a key consideration when high spatial resolution and intensities are required. Available refractive optics have non-negligible aberrations which degrade their final performance. We describe a framework based on physical-optics for simulating the effect of imperfect CRL upon an X-ray beam, taking into account measured phase errors obtained from at-wavelength metrology. We model, with increasing complexity, a CRL stack as a single thin phase element, then as a more realistic compound-element including absorption and thickness effects and finally, we add realistic optical imperfections to the CRL. Coherent and partially-coherent simulations using the "Synchrotron Radiation Workshop" (SRW) are used to evaluate the different models, the effects of the phase errors and to check the validity of the design equations and suitability of the figures of merit.

arXiv comment14 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables

References in corpus (1)

• X-ray optics and beam characterisation using random modulation: Experiments

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Polished diamond x-ray lenses
• A fast and light tool for partially-coherent beamline simulations in fourth generation storage rings based on coherent mode decomposition
• Tilting refractive x-ray lenses for fine-tuning their focal length
• Demonstration of full-scale spatio-temporal diagnostics of solid-density plasmas driven by an ultra-short relativistic laser pulse using an X-ray free-electron laser
• The Darkfield Approach to Measuring Vacuum Birefringence and Light-by-Light Couplings -- A Proof-of-Principle Experiment