NEP WP12 JA2 - meam expander calculations

A common tactic employed for expanding focused beams is to work outside the focal plane, which is often problematic as real optics are imperfect and the defocused beam often presents inhomogeneities. The aim of this work is to produce an expanded a focused beam for a given focusing system using refractive elements, while keeping the focal plane position unaltered.

Arbitrary x-ray beam manipulation has been developed and demonstrated in the context of aberration correction for x-ray focusing systems such as mirrors and compound refractive lenses (CRL). We show in this report our efforts in bringing established techniques from visible optics into the hard x-ray domain, taking Gaussian-to-top hat beam shapers as a base for our beam expander.