SwissFEL is a free electron laser, comprising of two undulator lines with three endstations each: covering 2 – 12.7 keV (up to 1.5 mJ) and 0.25 – 2 keV (up to 5.0 mJ), respectively.
We present the design and commissioning of the ATHOS soft x-ray optics, starting with the overall beamline-layout and the optical components inside the front-end: a gas attenuator, a thin foil based solid-state...
BEaTriX (Beam Expander Testing X-ray) is a unique facility developed at the INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico Brera (Merate, Italy) to test ATHENA’s X-ray mirror. The commissioning has been successfully completed, and the facility is now open to users.
The unique BEaTriX X-ray beam approximates the one created by an astronomical source (collimated and large), and it is re-created in a small lab...
State-of-the-art soft X-ray beamlines use collimated plan-grating monochromators (cPGM) as monochromatizing devices. Multi-Layer (ML) coated plane gratings and mirrors allow to extend the available photon energy range of cPGM’s towards the so-called tender X-ray photon energy range (up to 5 keV) providing a significantly higher photon flux. This X-ray energy regime covers L- and M-absorption...
The scattering properties of mirror surfaces are strongly dependent on the surface structure and radiation incidence angle, for a given photon energy. In particular, in Free Electron Laser and Synchrotron X-ray photon transport beamlines, the perturbation of the scattering effect is often dominant in the Point Spread Function (PSF) degradation. The perturbation theory explains the surface...
Varied-line-spacing grating is a key optical element in the light facilities, concerning lithography, holography, tomography, as well as spatially resolved monochromator/spectrometer. In the last decades, the grooves parameters of varied-line-spacing gratings are necessary to be strictly deduced through the light path function and the Fermat's principle. This method is of great importance to...
The race toward completing several next-generation X-ray light source facilities around the world has been running hot since a few years. This has created the need to accurately simulate the performances of the beamlines before they are built, so as to make sure the optimal layout has been chosen. To this end, the optical community has at its disposal several simulation tools, most of them...
The monochromatization of radiation in the extreme ultraviolet spectral region is accomplished by using diffraction gratings at grazing incidence. In the most general case, the grating is roto-translated to perform the wavelength scanning. Different optical configurations have been proposed until now, both using plane and concave gratings and with uniform or variable line spacing.
In this...
