ESCA MICROSCOPY AT ELETTRA - WHAT IT IS LIKE TO PERFORM SPECTROMICROSCOPY EXPERIMENTS ON A 3RD-GENERATION SYNCHROTRON-RADIATION SOURCE

We present ESCA Microscopy, the first X-ray microscopy beamline operat ing on ELETTRA, the third generation synchrotron radiation source in T rieste, Italy. ESCA Microscopy is an advanced user facility open to th e international scientific community; its operation is based on the us e of a Fresnel zone plate to demagnify to submicrometre dimensions the photon beam emitted by an undulator in the 200-1000 eV energy range. ESCA Microscopy was designed as a scanning photoemission microscope es pecially suited for surface analysis; it also operates in transmission mode and should find many applications in materials science, chemistr y and physics. We describe here the beamline experimental setup and pr esent some recent results obtained during the first months of operatio n. While so doing, we will outline certain spectroscopic aspects and p oint out some operational problems that are typical of scanning photoe mission microscopy, a technique which should find in advanced sources such as ELETTRA the right conditions to achieve maturity. (C) 1997 Els evier Science B.V.