Mechanical Design of Multiple Fresnel Zone Plates Precision Alignment Apparatus for Twenty-Nanometer Scale Hard X-ray Focusing

To overcome the limitations in today's fabrication techniques for high-efficiency Fresnel zone plates (FZPs) capable for hard x-ray focusing in the twenty-nanometer scale, a new approach of stacking FZPs in an intermediate-field was published by Vila-Comamala et al. in 2012 (1). With this approach, a precision alignment apparatus for multiple FZPs handling and aligning must be designed to meet the following challenging design requirements: 1) Each of the stacking FZPs need to be manipulated in three dimensions with nanometer-scale resolution and travel range of several millimeters. 2) The relative three-dimensional stabilities between all of the stacking FZPs (especially in the x-ray beam transverse plane) are required to be kept within few nanometers for more than eight hours, the duration of the hard x-ray focusing for nanoprobe operation. 3) Compatible with the operation of multiple optics configurations for the Advanced Photon Source (APS) future x-ray nanoprobe design. Several prototypes have been designed and tested at the APS. In this paper we present the precision mechanical design of the apparatus prototypes for two, three, and six FZPs alignment in an intermediate-field, as well as the test results of their hard x-ray focusing performances.