Pyrolitic Graphite Mosaic Crystal Thickness and Mosaicity Optimization for an Extended Source Von Hamos X-ray Spectrometer

Bragg spectroscopy, one of the best established experimental techniques for high energy resolution X-ray measurements, has always been limited to the measurement of photons produced from well collimated (tens of microns) or point-like sources; recently, the VOXES collaboration at INFN National Laboratories of Frascati developed a prototype of a high resolution and high precision X-ray spectrometer working also with extended isotropic sources. The realized spectrometer makes use of Highly Annealed Pyrolitic Graphite (HAPG) crystals in a “semi„-Von Hamos configuration, in which the position detector is rotated with respect to the standard Von Hamos one, to increase the dynamic energy range, and shows energy resolutions at the level of 0.1% for photon energies up to 10 keV and effective source sizes in the range 400–1200 μ m in the dispersive plane. Such wide effective source dimensions are achieved using a double slit system to produce a virtual point-like source between the emitting target and the crystal. The spectrometer performances in terms of reflection efficiency and peak resolution depend on several parameters, among which a special role is played by the crystal mosaicity and thickness. In this work, we report the measurements of the Cu(K α 1 , 2 ) and the Fe(K α 1 , 2 ) lines performed with different mosaicity and thickness crystals in order to investigate the influence of the parameters on the peak resolution and on the reflection efficiency mentioned above.