Kirkpatrick–Baez Mirror
A Kirkpatrick–Baez mirror, or simply KB mirror, focuses beams of X-rays by reflecting them at grazing incidence off a curved surface, usually coated with a layer of a heavy metal. It is named after Paul Kirkpatrick and Albert Baez, the inventors of the X-ray microscope. Although X-rays can be focused by compound refractive lenses, these also reduce the intensity of the beam and are therefore undesirable. KB mirrors, on the other hand, can focus beams to small spot sizes with minimal loss of intensity. Typically they are used in pairs - one to focus horizontally and one for vertical focus. When the horizontal and vertical focuses coincide, the X-ray beam is focused to a point. See also * X-ray microscope - First application of the KB mirror * X-ray optics X-ray optics is the branch of optics that manipulates X-rays instead of visible light. It deals with focusing and other ways of manipulating the X-ray beams for research techniques such as X-ray crystallography, X-ray fluore ...
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X-ray
An X-ray, or, much less commonly, X-radiation, is a penetrating form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation. Most X-rays have a wavelength ranging from 10  picometers to 10  nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30  petahertz to 30  exahertz ( to ) and energies in the range 145  eV to 124 keV. X-ray wavelengths are shorter than those of UV rays and typically longer than those of gamma rays. In many languages, X-radiation is referred to as Röntgen radiation, after the German scientist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who discovered it on November 8, 1895. He named it ''X-radiation'' to signify an unknown type of radiation.Novelline, Robert (1997). ''Squire's Fundamentals of Radiology''. Harvard University Press. 5th edition. . Spellings of ''X-ray(s)'' in English include the variants ''x-ray(s)'', ''xray(s)'', and ''X ray(s)''. The most familiar use of X-rays is checking for fractures (broken bones), but X-rays are also used in other ways. ...
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Paul Kirkpatrick
Paul H. Kirkpatrick (July 21, 1894 – December 26, 1992) was co-inventor of the X-ray reflection microscope, and the imaging technique he and his graduate student Albert Baez developed is still used, particularly in astronomy to take X-ray pictures of galaxies and in medicine.Paul Kirkpatrick, inventor of the X-ray microscope, dead at 98
. Obituary, Stanford University, 1992 An award in his name was established in the Physics Department at

Albert Baez
Albert Vinicio Báez (; November 15, 1912 – March 20, 2007) was a Mexican-American physicist and the father of singers Joan Baez and Mimi Fariña, and an uncle of John C. Baez. He made important contributions to the early development of X-ray microscopes and later X-ray telescopes. Early life Albert Báez was born in Puebla, Mexico in 1912 to Alerto B. Báez and Thalia Báez. His father was a Methodist minister and his mother was a social worker for the YWCA. Albert was four when his father moved his family to the United States, first to Texas for a year and then to New York City. Albert, his sister Mimi and brother Peter were raised in Brooklyn where his father founded the First Spanish Methodist Church. New York. During his youth, Baez contemplated becoming a minister, but he followed his interests in mathematics and physics instead. Báez earned degrees in mathematics and physics from Drew University (BS, 1933) and mathematics from Syracuse University (MS, 1935). He ...
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X-ray Microscope
An X-ray microscope uses electromagnetic radiation in the soft X-ray band to produce magnified images of objects. Since X-rays penetrate most objects, there is no need to specially prepare them for X-ray microscopy observations. Unlike visible light, X-rays do not reflect or refract easily and are invisible to the human eye. Therefore, an X-ray microscope exposes film or uses a charge-coupled device (CCD) detector to detect X-rays that pass through the specimen. It is a contrast imaging technology using the difference in absorption of soft X-rays in the water window region (wavelengths: 2.34–4.4 nm, energies: 280–530 eV) by the carbon atom (main element composing the living cell) and the oxygen atom (an element of water). Microfocus X-ray also achieves high magnification by projection. A microfocus X-ray tube produces X-rays from an extremely small focal spot (5 μm down to 0.1 μm). The X-rays are in the more conventional X-ray range (20 to 300 keV) ...
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Compound Refractive Lens
A Compound refractive lens (CRL) is a series of individual lenses arranged in a linear array in order to achieve focusing of X-rays in the energy range of 5-40 keV. They are an alternative to the KB mirror. For all materials the real part of the refractive index for X-rays is close to 1, hence a single conventional lens for X-rays has an extremely long focal length (for practical lens sizes). In addition, X-rays attenuate as they pass through a material so that conventional lenses for X-rays have long been considered impractical. The CRL gets its reasonably short focal length, on the order of meters, by using many lenses in series, hence reducing the curvatures of each lens to practical levels. Absorption in the lens is still a challenge, however, and lenses are usually made from low-atomic-number materials such as aluminium, beryllium, or lithium. CRLs were first demonstrated in the mid-1990s by a group of scientists at the ESRF. They drilled holes in an aluminium block, and achie ...
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X-ray Optics
X-ray optics is the branch of optics that manipulates X-rays instead of visible light. It deals with focusing and other ways of manipulating the X-ray beams for research techniques such as X-ray crystallography, X-ray fluorescence, small-angle X-ray scattering, X-ray microscopy, X-ray phase-contrast imaging, and X-ray astronomy. Since X-rays and visible light are both electromagnetic waves they propagate in space in the same way, but because of the much higher frequency and photon energy of X-rays they interact with matter very differently. Visible light is easily redirected using lenses and mirrors, but because the real part of the complex refractive index of all materials is very close to 1 for X-rays, they instead tend to initially penetrate and eventually get absorbed in most materials without changing direction much. X-ray techniques There are many different techniques used to redirect X-rays, most of them changing the directions by only minute angles. The most common princ ...
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Mirrors
A mirror or looking glass is an object that Reflection (physics), reflects an image. Light that bounces off a mirror will show an image of whatever is in front of it, when focused through the lens of the eye or a camera. Mirrors reverse the direction of the image in an equal yet opposite angle from which the light shines upon it. This allows the viewer to see themselves or objects behind them, or even objects that are at an angle from them but out of their field of view, such as around a corner. Natural mirrors have existed since prehistoric times, such as the surface of water, but people have been manufacturing mirrors out of a variety of materials for thousands of years, like stone, metals, and glass. In modern mirrors, metals like silver or aluminium are often used due to their high reflectivity, applied as a thin coating on glass because of its naturally smooth and very Hardness (materials science), hard surface. A mirror is a Wave (physics), wave reflector. Light consis ...
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