Elements of Modern X-ray Physics
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| Jens
Als-Nielsen Ørsted Laboratory Niels Bohr Institute Copenhagen University Denmark als@fys.ku.dk |
© John Wiley & Sons, Ltd (2001) ISBN: 0 471 498572 (HB) 0 471 49858 0 (PB) |
Des McMorrow Risø National Laboratory DK-4000 Roskilde Denmark mcmorrow@risoe.dk |
The construction of the first dedicated X-ray beamlines at synchrotron sources in the late 1970's heralded the start of a new era in X-ray science. In the intervening years tremendous progress has been made, both with respect to improvements to the sources, and with our knowledge of how to exploit them. Today's third-generation sources deliver extremely bright beams of radiation over the entire X-ray band (c. 1-500 keV), and with properties such as polarization, energy resolution, etc., that can be tailored to meet almost any requirement. These improvements have driven a surge of activity in X-ray science, and phenomena over a diverse range of disciplines can now be studied with X-rays that were undreamt of before the advent of synchrotron sources.
In light of these developments we believed that it was timely to produce a textbook at an introductory level. Our intention is to offer a coherent overview, which covers the basic physical principles underlying the production of X-rays, their interaction with matter, and also to explain how these properties are used in a range of applications. The main target audience for this book are final year undergraduates, and first year research students. Although the book has been written from the perspective of two physicists, we hope that it will be useful to the wider community of biologists, chemists, material scientists, etc., who work at synchrotron radiation facilities around the world. The main challenge in writing for a wider audience has been to convey the physical concepts without obscuring them in too much mathematical rigour. Therefore, many of the more difficult mathematical manipulations and theorems are explained in shaded boxes that may be studied separately. In addition appendices covering some of the required introductor physics have been included.
It is also our hope that this book will have appeal to more experienced research workers. Synchrotron radiation facilities are large laboratories where many different groups work on disparate areas of science. Cross fertilization of ideas is often the driving force of scientific progress. In order that these different groups, often working on neighbouring beamlines, can communicate their ideas a common background is required. It is our intention that this book should provide at least some of this background knowledge. In addition, many X-ray techniques are becoming viewed as standard analytical tools, and it is no longer necessary to understand every aspect of the design of an instrument in order to be able to perform experiments. While this is undoubtedly a positive development, it can also be argued that a greater knowledge of the underlying principles not only adds to the overall feeling of satisfaction, but also allows better experiments to be designed.
This book has emerged from a lecture course that has been running for several years at the University of Copenhagen. The material covered in this book is taught in one semester, and is augmented by practical lessons both in an X-ray laboratory at the university, and also during a week long trip to the HASYLAB synchrotron facility. The list of subjects covered in this book inevitably reflects to some degree our own areas of specialization. There is, for example, very little on the vast and important subject of imaging. It was also decided at an early stage not to focus on subjects, such as classical crystallography, that we felt were well described in other texts. In spite of these shortcomings we hope that the reader, whatever his or her background, will learn something by studying this book, and be inspired to think of new ways to exploit the great opportunities that the development of synchrotron radiation offers.
The book can be ordered directly from the following sites:
You are welcome to download the figures for use in teaching material.
They are, however, covered by copyright and explicit permission should be sought if they
are to be used in publications.
Listings of some of the MATLAB files used to generate the figures, and other useful files.