Synchrotrons work like a giant microscope, and they both need mirrors and lenses to bend and shape light. The better control we have over the light source, the more we can see. The quality of images that can be captured using a microscope or a synchrotron rely heavily on the optics used.
As technology has advanced over the past few decades and as synchrotron users push the boundaries of what can be achieved, there has been a lot of excitement over the upgrades of synchrotron mirrors and what that can mean for the experiments that can be done.
However, there is a bottleneck for the production of new and improved X-ray optics like mirrors. It turns out that it is hard to develop metrology instruments that can validate and measure the quality of new high-precision mirrors. Producing these instruments and alleviating the bottleneck is the goal of the metrology community, as they say, if you cannot test something, you cannot manufacture it.
Using the properties of speckle to get better measurements
The metrology community has made significant advances by making improvements to existing techniques to test X-ray mirrors. However, a team from Diamond set about creating a brand-new instrument which can potentially improve the toolbox for metrologists and manufacturers around the world.
Read more on the Diamond website
Image: Dr Hongchang Wang (Left) is supervising his PhD student Simone Moriconi (Right) for testing SAM system
