DEVELOPMENT OF AN ADVANCED KIRKPATRICK-BAEZ MICROSCOPE

We have developed an advanced Kirkpatrick-Baez (AKB) x-ray microscope to diagnose laser-produced plasmas. The AKB microscope is composed of two pairs of hyperbolic and elliptic mirrors to avoid spherical aberra tion and field obliquity. The spatial response of the microscope has b een measured by x-ray backlighting a fine grid with laser-plasma x ray s. A spatial resolution of better than 3 mu m has been obtained with 2 .5-keV x rays over the field of 800 mu m at a magnification of 25. Thi s microscope has been applied for laser implosion experiments, resulti ng in high-resolution images of the compressed cores. (C) 1996 Optical Society of America