		:: News	p1
		News Archive
		:: Conferences	p2
		:: Jobs	p2
		:: Grants & Awards	p2
		:: Business News	p3
		:: Books & Journals	p4
		:: Establishments	p5

adaptiveoptics.org provides news and information for the world-wide adaptive optics community.
Contact: webmaster@adaptiveoptics.org.

News

Research Partnership Advances X-ray Active Optics

London, U.K. – March, 2005: The active optics technologies that have become well established at visible wavelengths are now being extended into the X-ray domain. A multi-disciplinary team of scientists

		from several U.K. institutes is developing actively deformable grazing incidence mirrors for use at X-ray wavelengths. The team is also exploring the potential for this technology across a range of applications from medicine to semiconductor fabrication. Actively controlled grazing incidence mirrors have the potential to deliver very high resolution systems – focal spots significantly below 1 µm and imaging resolutions much smaller than 1 arc second. They also permit scanning or image optimisation in different parts of the field of view. The best low-energy X-ray optics currently available are around an order of magnitude away from being diffraction limited, and as the X-ray energy increases the situation rapidly deteriorates. Active X-ray mirrors promise a very large performance gain for applications that include the micro-irradiation of cells; X-ray lithography in microfabrication; X-ray astronomy and X-ray microscopy.

The participants in the EPSRC-funded Smart X-ray Optics project are the Optical Science Laboratory, UCL; the Scottish Microelectronics Centre; the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UCL; the X-ray Group, King’s College London and the Gray Cancer Institute.		A grazing incidence mirror shell under test at UCL. Image: Optical Science Laboratory, UCL

Full Article (pp.2–4, Smart Optics Newsletter, Issue 7)

^ [TOP]
<< [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] >>