Highly efficient, easily spectrally tunable X-ray backlighting for the study of extreme matter states.

An improved high luminosity, easily spectrally tunable backlighting scheme based on a spherically bent crystal is considered in this paper. Contrary to the traditional backlighting scheme, we used crystal far from normal incidence, and the backlighter source was inside the Rowland circle. With the presented configuration, we obtained a spatial resolution up to 8 mm in the desired direction with an X-ray backlighting energy close to 5 keV. Detailed discussions and ray-tracing calculations show that with this convenient scheme resolution down to 5 mm can be achieved. A dedicated application to high energy density physics is presented: the radiography of shock compressed matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]