From Soft to Hard X-ray with a Single Grating Monochromator

Even if not well defined a border exists between the soft and the hard X‐ray region. The optics adopted in one region is not suitable for the other region and vice versa. Nevertheless, recently more and more experimentalists wish to investigate their samples by using an energy range as wide as possible. Without adopting complicated and very expensive mechanical solutions, it is a major challenge, for the optical designer, to find a solution suitable for both spectral ranges. This was our task for the TwinMic beamline at Elettra, the Italian 3rd generation synchrotron radiation source. This beamline will house a twin x‐ray microscope, which combines scanning and full‐field imaging in a single multipurpose end station and is operated in the 0.2–3 keV photon energy range. This energy range will be covered by a blazed grating, which has a very shallow blaze angle of 0.4°. With this grating mechanically ruled in the grating laboratory of Carl Zeiss very high diffraction efficiency can be achieved, expected to ...