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A new ultraprecision profiler has been developed to measure for example asymmetric and aspheric profiles. The principle of our measuring method is that the normal vector at each point on the surface is determined by making the incident light beam on the mirror surface and the reflected beam at that point coincident. The gradient at each point is calculated from the normal vector, and the surface profile is then obtained by integrating the gradients. The measuring instrument was designed in accordance with the above principle for the measuring method and is called Surface Gradient Integrated Profiler (SGIP). In the design, four ultraprecision goniometers were applied to adjust the light axis for the normal vector measurement. These goniostages make it possible to attain an angular resolution of 0.018 μ radian by electrically dividing a pulse of the rotary encoder. The surface gradients are determined only by the rotational angle of goniometers. Thus in the measuring instrument, the most important factor is the accuracy of the normal vectors measured by the goniometers. To attain an accuracy of 0.1 μ radian, we developed a system for correcting the rotational angle error of the goniometers in which the trigonometric measuring method is utilized for geometrical angle determination. © 2007 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We designed, fabricated and evaluated a total-reflection mirror having a designed focal size of 28 nm at 15keV. Line-focus tests on the fabricated mirror were carried out at the 1-km-long beamline (BL29XUL) of SPring-8. Nearly diffraction-limited performance with a full width at half maximum spot size of 30 nm was realized at 15 keV. We are planning to fabricate multilayer-coated mirror for realizing sub-10-nm focusing in hard x-ray region. We suggest a novel method of at-wavelength metrology. Wave-front error on the mirror surface can be estimated by a phase retrieval method using the intensity profile around the focal point. By correcting the estimated wave-front errors, sub-10-nm focusing is potentially feasible. © 2007 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In scanning X-ray microscopy, focused beam intensity and size are very important from the viewpoints of improvements of various performances such as sensitivity and spatial resolution. The K-B mirror optical system is considered to be the most promising method for hard X-ray focusing, allowing highly efficient and energy-tunable focusing. We developed focusing optical system using K-B mirrors where the focused beam size is controllable within the range of 50 – 1500 nm. The focused beam size and beam intensity can be adjusted by changing the source size, although beam intensity and size are in a trade-off relationship. This controllability provides convenience for microscopy application. Diffraction limited focal size is also achieved by setting the source size to 10 μm. Intracellular elemental mappings at the single-cell level were performed to demonstrate the performance of the scanning X-ray fluorescence microscope equipped with the optical system at the BL29XUL of SPring-8. We will show magnified elemental images with spatial resolution of ∼70 nm. © 2007 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]