Some new schemes for producing high-accuracy elliptical x-ray mirrors by elastic bending

Although x-ray micro-foci can be produced by a variety of diffractive methods, grazing incidence mirrors are the only route to an achromatic focus. In this paper we describe our efforts to produce elliptically shaped mirrors with the very high figure accuracy necessary for producing a micro-focus. The motivation for this work is provided by the need to produce achromatic foci for a range of applications ranging from tunable micro-focus x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (mu-XPS) at soft x-ray energies to micro-focus white beam x-ray diffraction (mu-XRD) at hard x-ray energies. We describe the methodology of beam bending, a practical example of a system we have produced for mu-XRD, and results demonstrating the production of a surface with micro-radian figure accuracy.