Diffractive soft and hard X-ray optics

The Laboratory for Micro- and Nanotechnology provides the essential technologies necessary for the design and fabrication of diffractive x-ray optics for a wide range of applications. Over the past years, a large variety of optics has been fabricated and tested in collaboration with a large number of partners. To ensure good performance of the devices, they have to be tailored to the specific needs of a specific x-ray optical experiment in terms of photon energy and spatial coherence of the source, as well as required spatial resolution, working distance and diffraction efficiency. We report on a selection of such developments including transmission Fresnel phase zone plates for microscopy or microprobe applications at photon energies ranging from the EUV to the multi-keV region. For photon energies beyond 10 keV transmission zone plates are very rarely used. Our recent development of linear optics with ultra high aspect ratio structures has opened up it way to extend the applications of diffractive optics at least to the 30 keV range. Besides focusing elements, other diffractive optics such as decoherers or beam splitters for interferometric applications are presented.