Theory of oblique and grazing incidence Talbot‑Lau interferometers and demonstration in a compact source x‑ray reflective interferometer

With the advent of Talbot-Lau interferometers for x-ray phase-contrast imaging, oblique and grazing incidence configurations are now used in the pursuit of sub-micron grating periods and high sensitivity. Here we address the question whether interferometers having oblique incident beams behave in the same way as the well-understood normal incidence ones, particularly when the grating planes are non-parallel. We derive the normal incidence equivalence of oblique incidence geometries from wave propagation modeling. Based on the theory, we propose a practical method to correct for non-parallelism of the grating planes, and demonstrate its effectiveness with a polychromatic hard x-ray reflective interferometer.