SIGRAY, INC. — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: 09a

Description

The increasing complexity of modern materials and devices and the progression of research in disciplines such as the life science and energy materials science has driven the critical desire for analytical tools to obtain heterogeneity information across the length scales, ranging from macroscopic scale down to the nanometer level- X-ray nanofocusing systems at synchrotron particle accelerators provide major analytical advantages and are frequently required to conduct leading-edge research, the limited availability of time at such systems is a major impediment to scientific progress- A solution that increases synchrotron beamline efficiency and capacity available by making existing nanofocusing systems more efficient and enables cost-effective upgrades of lower resolution synchrotron systems to enable multi-length scale analysis capabilities that reach down to 10 nm resolution is needed- The proposed x-ray nanofocusing system will couple two major recent optical development breakthroughs- The first is that of a bonded Multilayer Laue lens (MLL) which can provide high efficiency focusing down to 10 nm resolution but requires matching the phase space of the x-ray source to that of the MLL, which limits the efficient use of x-rays provided by the synchrotron- The second is a capillary x-ray mirror lens developed by the proposing company that provides extremely high-efficiency focusing with microns-scale resolution and large phase space- By coupling the capillary x-ray mirror lens as a pre-focusing optic upstream of the MLL, a high efficiency nanofocusing system can be developed that will provide high flux at tunable x-ray spot sizes from tens of microns to 100 nm for synchrotron systems, enabling more efficient use of synchrotron beamtime and cost-effective upgrades-