Statistical Optics approach to the design of beamlines for Synchrotron Radiation

TL;DR

This paper develops a rigorous statistical optics framework to analyze and design beamlines for synchrotron radiation, explicitly calculating coherence properties and image formation considering electron beam emittance and optical system imperfections.

Contribution

It introduces a method to compute the cross-spectral density of undulator sources and propagates it through optical systems, addressing limitations of Gaussian models for X-ray coherence.

Findings

Explicit calculation of undulator source coherence properties.

Reduction of complex integrals to analytical convolutions.

Analysis of aberrations and aperture effects on image formation.

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the image formation problem for undulator radiation through an optical system, accounting for the influence of the electron beam emittance. On the one hand, image formation with Synchrotron Radiation is governed by the laws of Statistical Optics. On the other hand, the widely used Gaussian-Shell model cannot be applied to describe the coherence properties of X-ray beams from third generation Synchrotron Radiation sources. As a result, a more rigorous analysis of coherence properties is required. We propose a technique to explicitly calculate the cross-spectral density of an undulator source, that we subsequently propagate through an optical imaging system. At first we focus on the case of an ideal lens with a non-limiting pupil aperture. Our theory, which makes consistent use of dimensionless analysis, also allows treatment and physical understanding of many asymptotes of the parameter space, together with their applicability region. Particular emphasis is given to the asymptotic situation when the horizontal emittance is much larger than the radiation wavelength, which is relevant for third generation Synchrotron Radiation sources. First principle calculations of undulator radiation characteristics (i.e. ten-dimensional integrals) are then reduced to one-dimensional convolutions of analytical functions with universal functions specific for undulator radiation sources. We also consider the imaging problem for a non-ideal lens in presence of aberrations and a limiting pupil aperture, which increases the dimension of the convolution from one to three. In particular we give emphasis to cases when the intensity at the observation plane can be presented as a convolution of an impulse response function and the intensity from an ideal lens.