Future X-ray astronomy missions will require orders of magnitude improvement in collecting area and resolution. Foils optics are attractive candidates for X-ray telescopes because of the tremendous weight and cost savings which can be achieved compared to traditional monolithic optics. However, substantial improvements in our ability to assemble foils to high accuracy are required. In this rese...

We present recent test results and discuss design challenges on x-ray optical components for the wiggler sources at CHESS and for the proposed energy recovery linac (ERL) source at Cornell. For the existing wiggler sources, a new white-beam collimating mirror has been installed and tested at F-line and some preliminary test results are presented. For the proposed ERL, three types of x-ray optic...

A summary of focusing X ray polycapillary optics is presented including history, theory, modeling, and applications development. The focusing effects of polycapillary optics come from the overlap of the beams from thousands of small hollow glass tubes. Modeling efforts accurately describe optics performance to allow for system development in a wide variety of geometries. The focusing of X ray b...

Multilayer x-ray optics provide a useful alternative to perfect crystal optics when used as beam conditioners for hard x-rays (~8 keV) in applications that do not require high energy and/or angular resolution. Perfect crystal optics, however, can be cut in such a way that allows one to partially engineer the input and output beam widths and divergence to desired values. Such optics, termed asym...

A novel x-ray microscope system has been developed for the purpose of quantitative and sensitive three-dimensional (3D) phase-contrast x-ray microimaging. The optical system is a hybrid that consists of a scanning microscope optics with a one-dimensional (1D) focusing (line-focusing) device and an imaging microscope optics with a 1D objective. These two optics are orthogonally arranged regardin...

Polycapillary devices focus X-rays by means of multiple reflections of X-rays in arrays of bent glass capillaries. The size of the focal spot (typically 10-100 μm) limits the resolution of scanning, absorption and phase-contrast X-ray imaging using these devices. At the expense of a moderate resolution, polycapillary elements provide high intensity and are frequently used for X-ray micro-imagin...