X-ray interferometers based on refractive optics

Abstract

A novel type of hard x-ray interferometers employing compound refractive lenses is proposed. One such interferometer is a bilens system with two parallel arrays of planar refractive lenses. Under coherent illumination the bilens generates two diffraction-limited mutually coherent beams. Slightly overlapping these beams produces an interference pattern with a fringe spacing ranging from tens of nanometers to tens of micrometers. This simple way to create an x-ray standing wave in paraxial geometry opens up the opportunity to develop new x-ray interferometry techniques to study natural and advanced man-made nanoscale materials, such as self-organized biosystems, photonic and colloidal crystals, and nanoelectronics materials. © 2011 American Institute of Physics.