We describe a compact soft x-ray reflectometer for in-house characterization of water-window multilayer optics. The instrument is based on a line-emitting, liquid-jet, laser-plasma source in combination with angular scanning of the studied multilayer optics. With a proper choice of target liquid and thin-film filters, one or a few lines of well-defined wavelength dominate the spectrum and multi...

Focusing hard x-ray free-electron laser radiation with extremely high fluence sets stringent demands on the x-ray optics. Any material placed in an intense x-ray beam is at risk of being damaged. Therefore, it is crucial to find the damage thresholds for focusing optics. In this paper we report experimental results of exposing tungsten and diamond diffractive optics to a prefocused 8.2 keV free...

While ray optics is a valid model for many multimode optical systems, it cannot capture diffraction and interference phenomena which may be required, for example, in calculating speckle propagation in multimode fiber. Wave optics includes the effect of interference and diffraction, but it is usually much more costly computationally. We show how to bridge the gap between ray and wave optics by u...

Absfracf-The principles of ray optics and, in more detail, some selected applications of ray techniques to electromagnetic8 are reviewed briefly. It is shown how a systematic use of matrix representation for the wavefront curvature and for its transformations simplify the handling of arbitrary pencils of rays and, consequently, the field computations. The same methods apply to complex rays whic...

Focusing optics based on Wolter optical geometries developed for x-ray grazing incidence beams can be designed for neutron beams. Wolter optics are formed by grazing incidence reflections from two concentric conic sections (for example, a paraboloid and a hyperboloid). This has transformed observational X-ray astronomy by increasing the sensitivity by many orders of magnitude for research in as...

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: X-ray diffraction Polycapillary optics X-ray focused beam Focusing X-ray opt...

An effective x-ray optical method to focus keV x-ray pulses shorter than one picosecond by using spherically or toroidally bent crystals is presented. The spectral, spatial, and time-dependent properties of focusing by two-dimensional bent crystals are calculated by considering geometrical effects, physical limitation in high performance crystal optics, and reflectivities obtained by x-ray diff...

With the advances in computer processing that have yielded an enormous increase in performance, numerical analytical approaches based on electromagnetic theory have recently been applied to mobile radio propagation analysis. One such approach is the ray-tracing method based on geometrical optics and the uniform geometrical theory of diffraction. In this paper, ray-tracing techniques that have b...

Polycapillary optics can be designed for a wide variety of x-ray applications. They have been used as focusing collectors for x-ray astronomy, to produce large-area collimated beams for wafer analysis and to provide small focused beams for protein crystallography with low-power x-ray sources. They are also being developed for a number of medical applications, including the removal of Compton sc...

It has been almost 100 years since Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity in 1905. He showed that the basic space–time symmetry is dictated by the Lorentz group. It is shown that this group of Lorentz transformations is not only applicable to special relativity, but also constitutes the scientific language for optical sciences. It is noted that coherent and squeezed states of ligh...