Optimizing illumination for full field imaging at high brilliance hard X-ray synchrotron sources.

A new technique is presented to overcome beam size limitation in full field imaging at high brilliance synchrotron sources using specially designed refractive X-ray optics. These optics defocus the incoming beam in vertical direction and reshape the intensity distribution from a Gaussian to a more desirable top-hat-shaped profile at the same time. With these optics X-ray full-field imaging of extended objects becomes possible without having to stack several scans or applying a cone beam geometry in order to image the entire specimen. For in situ experiments in general and for diffraction limited sources in particular this gain in field of view and the optimization of the intensity distribution is going to be very beneficial.