Applications and advances in polycapillary optics

Polycapillary optics can be designed for a wide variety of x-ray applications. They have been used as focusing collectors for x-ray astronomy, to produce large-area collimated beams for wafer analysis and to provide small focused beams for protein crystallography with low-power x-ray sources. They are also being developed for a number of medical applications, including the removal of Compton scattering with the resultant improvement in contrast and resolution in mammography, the production of monochromatic parallel beams for high-contrast imaging in a clinical setting and the detection and localization of radioactive tracers in prostate cancer. Other exciting applications are extensions of measurements normally performed at synchrotrons into laboratory or clinical settings because of the increased efficiency of source utilization. The realization of these applications has been advanced by the recent marked improvement in available optic quality and reproducibility. Manufacturing progress has been assisted by the development of simulation analyses which allow for increasingly accurate assessment of optics defects. Optics performance over the whole range of energy from 10 to 80 keV can often be matched with one or two fitting parameters. This software development is ongoing, as is development of crystallographic analysis software designed to be used with highly focused beams. Continuing optics manufacturing challenges include the advance of applications at energies above 40 keV and the production of optics for imaging which are of adequate clinical size.