Preliminary design of a zone plate based hard X-ray monochromatic diffraction nanoprobe for materials studies at APS

摘要

Aiming at studies of the micro/nano-structures of a broad range materials and electronic devices, Advance Photon Source (APS) is developing a dedicated diffraction nanoprobe (DNP) beamline for the needs arising from a multidiscipline research community. As a part of the APS Upgrade Project, the planed facility, named Sub-micron 3-D Diffraction (S3DD) beamline~1, integrates the K-B mirror based polychromatic Laue diffraction and the Fresnel zone-plate based monochromatic diffraction techniques that currently support 3D/2D microdiffraction programs at the 34-ID-E and 2-ID-D of the APS, respectively. Both diffraction nanoprobes are designed to have a 50-nm or better special resolution. The zone-plate based monochromatic DNP has been preliminarily designed and will be constructed at the sector 34-ID. It uses an APS-3.0-cm period or APS-3.3-cm period undulator, a liquid-nitrogen cooled mirror as its first optics, and a water cooled small gap silicon double-crystal monochromator with an energy range of 5-30 keV. A set of zone plates have been designed to optimize for focusing efficiency and the working distance based on the attainable beamline length and the beam coherence. To ensure the nanoprobe performance, high stiffness and high precision flexure stage systems have been designed or demonstrated for optics mounting and sample scanning, and high precision temperature control of the experimental station will be implemented to reduce thermal instability. Designed nanoprobe beamline has a good management on thermal power loading on optical components and allows high degree of the preservation of beam brilliance for high focal flux and coherence. Integrated with variety of X-ray techniques, planed facility provides nano-XRD capability with the maximum reciprocal space accessibility and allows micro/nano-spectroscopy studies with K-edge electron binding energies of most elements down to Vanadium in the periodic table. We will discuss the preliminary design of the zone-plate based monochromatic DNP and its technical relevance to a broad range of scientific applications.