Surface profiling of X-ray mirrors for shaping focused beams

Grazing incidence mirrors are a standard optic for focusing X-rays. Active mirrors, whose surface profile can be finely adjusted, allow control of beam shape and size at the sample. However, progress towards their routine use for beam shaping has been hampered by the strong striations in reflected beams away from the focal plane. Re-entrant (partly concave and partly convex) surface modifications are proposed for shaping X-ray beams to a top-hat in the focal plane while reducing the striations caused by unavoidable polishing errors. A method for constructing such surfaces with continuous height and slope (but only piecewise continuous curvature) will be provided. Ray tracing and wave propagation calculations confirm its effectiveness. A mirror system is proposed allowing vertical beam sizes in the range 0.5 to 10μm. A prototype will be fabricated and is expected to have applications on many synchrotron X-ray beamlines.