Practical Electron Microscopy and Database

X-ray optics is a branch of optics. X-ray optics manipulates X-rays instead of visible lights in normal light optics and electron beams in electron microscopes (EMs). The lenses for visible light are made of transparent materials that can have a refractive index significantly larger than 1 and the lenses for EMs are composed of magnetic lens , for X-rays the index of refraction is slightly smaller than unity. X-ray optics has been applied to X-ray analytical instruments for several years. Applications of X-ray optics have been reported in X-ray microscopes, X-ray telescopes, X-ray diffraction, X-ray fluorescence, tomography, lithography, wavelength dispersive spectroscopy (WDS), and -dispersive spectroscopy (EDS). The X-ray optics has been used to increase the X-ray flux incident on the specimen and to direct, focus, and collimate the emitted X-rays from a specimen (e.g. in EDS systems).

Especially, in EDS systems, focusing X-ray optics has been used on both the excitation and detection sides.