Development and application of variable-magnification x-ray Bragg magnifiers

A novel x-ray Bragg magnifier of variable magnification is proposed. We describe the basic properties of the magnifier based on the dynamical theory of x-ray diffraction, and experimentally investigated its performance at the vertical wiggler beamline BL-14B of the Photon Factory. Using a Si(2 2 0) asymmetric crystal as the Bragg magnifier, we successfully controlled the magnification factor, M, between 0.1 and 10.0 at a wavelength of 0.112 nm. The observed spatial resolution with an x-ray CCD camera, the pixel size of which was 23 μm×23 μm, was 10 μm at M=10, 50 μm at M=1 and 250 μm at M=0.17. As a demonstration, we successfully used the x-ray magnifier for computed tomography for the non-destructive observation of a glass tube at several magnification factors.