Advanced laser-backlit grazing-incidence x-ray imaging systems for inertial confinement fusion research. I. Design

By use of a focusing configuration analogous to a Gregorian or a Cassegrain telescope, the on-axis aberration of a grazing-incidence spheric-based Kirkpatrick-Baez compound microscope may be precisely corrected. For finite fields, the off-axis performance degrades too rapidly for high-spatial-resolution imaging of even the smallest objects of interest, However, by use of ray-trace optimization it is possible to perturb the system such that the perfect, but impractical, on-axis performance is modestly degraded and uniformly distributed over a chosen object field. By use of this and other performance-enhancing features, two example ultrahigh-spatial-resolution laser-backlit x-ray microscope designs suitable for inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research have been developed. A companion paper [Appl. Opt. 40, 4588 (2001)] describing the tolerance analysis indicates that <0.5-mum spatial resolution at x-ray energies as high as 25 KeV is possible. As a prototype step, simpler noncompound devices are under consideration for Sandia National Laboratories' Z accelerator/Z-Beamlet ICF facility. (C) 2001 Optical Society of America.