Parabolic refractive X-ray lenses:: a breakthrough in X-ray optics

Refractive X-ray lenses, considered for a long time as unfeasible. have been realized with a rotational parabolic profile at our institute: The main features of the new lenses are: they focus in two directions and are free of spherical aberration. By varying the number of individual lenses in the stack the focal length can be chosen in a typical range from 0.5 to 2 in for photon energies between about 6 and 60 keV, The aperture of the lens is about 1 mm matching the angular divergence Of Undulator beams at 3d generation synchrotron radiation sources. They cope without problems with the heat load from the white beam of an undulator. Finally, they are easy to align and to operate. Refractive X-ray lenses can be used with hard X-rays in the same way as glass lenses can be used for visible light, if it is taken into account that the numerical aperture is small (of the order 10(-4)). Being high-quality optical elements, the refractive X-ray lenses can be used for generating a focal spot in the mum range with a gain of a factor 1000 and more, or for imaging purposes as in a hard X-ray microscope. Recent examples from microanalysis. microtomography, fluorescence tomography, X-ray microscopy will be shown to demonstrate the state of the art. Possible new developments will be discussed. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.