Surface roughness of stainless-steel mirrors for focusing soft x rays.

We have used polished stainless steel as a mirror substrate to provide focusing of soft x rays in grazing-incidence reflection. The critical issue of the quality of the steel surface, polished and coated with gold, is discussed in detail. A comparison is made to a polished, gold-coated, electroless nickel surface, which provides a smoother finish.

High-resolution ab initio three-dimensional x-ray diffraction microscopy.

Coherent x-ray diffraction microscopy is a method of imaging nonperiodic isolated objects at resolutions limited, in principle, by only the wavelength and largest scattering angles recorded. We demonstrate x-ray diffraction imaging with high resolution in all three dimensions, as determined by a quantitative analysis of the reconstructed volume images. These images are retrieved from the three-dimensional diffraction data using no a priori knowledge about the shape or composition of the object, which has never before been demonstrated on a nonperiodic object.