basics

Glass capillary optics are used for collimating, focusing, parallizing x-ray beams. These components utilize total external reflection of x-rays on smooth surfaces. They are comprised of capillaries which are specially arranged or bent according to the requirements of x-ray beam formation. These capillary structures are made of special glass with inner surfaces of extremely high quality.

Elements of polycapillary x-ray optics are widely known as "x-ray lenses". However it is important to emphasize that polycapillary x-ray optics is not an imaging optics. Therefore focusing and parallizing elements do not belong to the class of optical lenses which can provide point-to-point imaging. In spite of this fact the terms of "lens" and "semilens" are generally used for naming these elements and have become a part of the scientific slang.

Polycapillary optics and its main characteristics are described in the VDI/VDE (Association of German Engineers) guidelines 5575 which is under development now.