New monochromator optics for tender X-rays

"Tender X-rays"? Like the baby bear's bed, I gather. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Not exactly. But I suppose between hard and soft X-rays, "tender" X-rays could be seen as "just right", which was what the article was trying to tell us, as public relations puffs always do.

Looks like an expensive solution; mostly, silicon crystals are good for that soft X-ray energy range, and have excellent precision because... the stuff is mass-produced in single crystal form. I've done some work at the high end of that X-ray range, and it did take us a few minutes to measure details of the X-ray absorption spectrum. I wasn't also trying to image (scan a large area).

On the face of it, these are actually blazed gratings, which is a kind of (presumably etching) tour-de-force starting with accurate photolithography.

Cheers

We used ion chambers; gas ionization isn't terribly compact or efficient, but it IS nicely linear, with a bit of gas-mix control. Keithley got a lot of our business with their low-current measure equipment.