Absolute X-ray energy measurement using a high-accuracy angle encoder

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-precision method for absolute X-ray photon energy measurement using a Bond diffractometer and a highly accurate angle encoder, enabling rapid in-situ measurements across a wide energy range.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel measurement system combining a Bond diffractometer with a SelfA angle encoder for precise, real-time X-ray energy determination.

Findings

Achieved measurement of potassium-40 excitation energy with 0.6 eV uncertainty.

System demonstrated an energy measurement precision of 0.7 ppm.

First excited state energy measured with an order of magnitude higher accuracy.

Abstract

This paper presents an absolute X-ray photon energy measurement method that uses a Bond diffractometer. The proposed system enables the prompt and rapid in-situ measurement of photon energies in a wide energy range. The diffractometer uses a reference silicon single crystal plate and a highly accurate angle encoder called SelfA. We evaluate the performance of the system by repeatedly measuring the energy of the first excited state of the potassium-40 nuclide. The excitation energy is determined as 29829.39(6) eV. It is one order of magnitude more precise than the previous measurement. The estimated uncertainty of the photon energy measurement was 0.7 ppm as a standard deviation and the maximum observed deviation was 2 ppm.