Simple glass-capillary converters of soft x rays

Theoretical and experimental investigations were made of the properties of simple glass-capillary converters (GCCs), which can be used to transport sofl x-ray (SXR) beams and alter their cross sections. The conditions during propagation of SXR beams in a capillary were considered for an arbitrary position of a compact source, relative to the position of the entry face of the capillary. The characteristics of transport of SXR beams in a close-packed capillary bundle were also studied. An experimental investigation was made of the dependences of the GCC efficiency and transmission, and also of the SXR beam divergence at the exit from GCCs of different types, on the wavelength and on the distance from the source to the entry face of a GCC. A reasonable agreement between the calculated and experimental data was achieved. It was found experimentally that a pinhole camera with a GCC could be used in pinhole photography of dense hot plasmas. This method can deliver plasma images without the distorting influence of hard x rays emitted by a plasma. Simple and inexpensive bundle GCCs are suitable in those cases when the use of multilayer x-ray mirrors of zone plates is undesirable.