X-Ray Transmission Characteristic Measurements of Polycapillary Optics Installed in an Analytical Electron Microscope

This paper studies the polycapillary optics that are used to focus and transmit the X-rays emitted by a transmission electron microscope (TEM) specimen to an energy dispersive spectrometer using a superconducting transition edge sensor (TES) microcalorimeter. In this study, X-rays are collected from a TEM specimen and are then focused on a silicon drift detector, from which energy spectrum measurements of the polycapillary optics are taken and used to determine the transmission characteristics of the optics. When the polycapillary optics are used, an increase of 25.9 is seen in the intensity of 4.6 keV X-rays, while an increase of 6.0 is seen for 12.6 keV X-rays. The focal spot sizes of the X-ray beams from the polycapillary optics are found to be 382 μm for the 4.6 keV X-rays and 156 μm for the 12.6 keV X-rays. Further improvement of these characteristics can be achieved by improving the alignment of the optics to the detector and the collimator, which immediately precedes the detector, and by optimizing the collimator width.