Zone plate tilt study in transmission X-ray microscope system at 8-11 keV

Abstract

Zone plate [1] has been used as a focal lens in transmission X-ray microscope (TXM) optical system in recent decades [2, 3]. In TXM of NSRRC[4,5], the thickness of zone plate is about 900nm and the width of its out most zones is 50nm, which has a high aspect ratio 18. When zone plate is tilted, the image quality will be affected by aberration. Since the aspect ratio of zone plate is large, for incident beam, the shape of zone plate's transmission function will look different when zone plate is tilted. The both experimental and simulation result will be shown in this present. A five axes stage is designed and manufactured for the zone plate holder for three dimensional movement, tip and tilt. According to Fourier theory, we can calculate the wave distribution on image plane, if we know the original wave function, the distances between each element, and the transparencies of the sample and zone plate. A parallel simulation process code in MATLAB is developed in workstation cluster with up to 128Gbytes memory. The effects of aberration generated by tilt effect are compared from the experimental data and simulation result. A maximum tilt angle within the acceptable image quality is calculated by simulation and will be verified by experiment.