A hybrid active optical system for wave front preservation and variable focal distance

A new Free Electron Laser (FEL) user facility, named FERMI@Elettra, is under construction at Sincrotrone Trieste (Italy). It is based on a seeded scheme to provide an almost perfect transform limited beam with fully spatial coherence. The wavelength range will be 100-3 nm with fundamental and will go down to 1 nm by using higher harmonics. It will be operative by autumn 2010. The exceptional characteristics of the source must be preserved until the experimental chamber, where a large set of different experiments will be performed. This condition poses very tight requirements to the design of the beamlines and, in particular, to the focusing optics. Here we will present the active optics system developed for Fermi but intended to be used also on the Elettra beamlines. It is based on the adoption of a hybrid active system composed by UHV compatible stepping motors and piezo ceramic actuators. These mirrors are supposed to provide focal distances from 0.8 m to infinity with an angle of incidence up to a few degrees and residual shape errors below 10 or 5 nm (depending on the wavelength). In this way it is possible to work with an almost perfect focused coherent beam as well as with a uniform defocused or unfocused image. The metrology results on the first 400 mm long mirror will be shown and the actuator system described. A strain gauge assembly, calibrated in Elettra by means of a long trace profiler, and controlled by a custom made electronic system developed by us, is used as a direct in situ encoder. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.