Nested Kirkpatrick–Baez (Montel) optics for hard X-rays

Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Author(s) of this paper may load this reprint on their own web site or institutional repository provided that this cover page is retained. Republication of this article or its storage in electronic databases other than as specified above is not permitted without prior permission in writing from the IUCr. A comprehensive description and ray-tracing simulations are presented for symmetric nested Kirkpatrick–Baez (KB) mirrors, commonly used at synchrotrons and in commercial X-ray sources. This paper introduces an analytical procedure for determining the proper orientation between the two surfaces composing the nested KB optics. This procedure has been used to design and simulate collimating optics for a hard-X-ray inverse Compton scattering source. The resulting optical device is composed of two 12 cm-long parabolic surfaces coated with a laterally graded multilayer and is capable of collimating a 12 keV beam with a divergence of 5 mrad (FWHM) by a factor of $250. A description of the ray-tracing software that was developed to simulate the graded multilayer mirrors is included.