Advanced Multilayer X-ray Optics Group

The Advanced Multilayer X-ray Optics group is developing novel multilayer-based X-ray optics and utilizing these in different experiments performed at intense, coherent X-ray sources such as state-of-the-art synchrotrons and free electron lasers. Such sources have opened up new opportunities for breaking barriers in focusing, dispersing, and otherwise controlling x-ray pulses in space and time, which will enable exciting new applications in imaging, spectroscopy, and nonlinear optics. Our goal is to develop efficient x-ray optical elements to build up the functionalities that are taken for granted in laser laboratories but have long been denied to scientists working in the x-ray range. By controlling the 3D structure of materials over large volumes and on nanometer scales we are building a new class of nanofocusing lenses, gratings, pulse compressors, waveplates, and beam splitters.
 
Among these, we are in particular focused on the development of multilayer Laue lenses. These optics have a great potential to enable nanometer resolution X-ray microscopy, which is opening new applications never possible before. Constructing a lens with a high numerical aperture and thus, high resolution, requires atomic scale precision in the placement and orientation of the layers. The imaging performance of current MLLs is still limited by lens wavefront aberrations so we are also developing new ways to measure and characterize these aberrations and to use this information to improve our fabrication process.