Method for Rapid Fabrication of Silicon Dioxide X-ray Microoptics

An approach to rapid (in less than 1 h) prototyping of X-ray microlenses from silica with an aperture of about 50 μm and a radius of curvature of 10 μm is presented. The formation of a concave microlens surface is achieved by using focused ion beam systems and isotropic etching in hydrofluoric acid. The presented approach allows obtaining a gain in the fabrication time by about 10 times compared to ion-beam lithography. Furthermore, the fabrication of a series of lenses will lead to a reduction in time costs proportional to the number of simultaneously processed lenses in an acid solution.