Towards brilliant, compact x-ray sources: A new x-ray photonic device

General Electric has designed an innovative x-ray photonic device that concentrates a polychromatic beam of diverging x-rays into a less divergent, parallel, or focused x-ray beam. The device consists of multiple, thin film multilayer stacks. X-rays incident on a given multilayer stack propagate within a high refractive index transmission layer while undergoing multiple total internal reflections from a novel, engineered multilayer containing materials of lower refractive index. Development of this device could lead to order-of-magnitude flux density increases, over a large broadband energy range from below 20 keV to above 300 keV. In this paper, we give an overview of the device and present GE's progress towards fabricating prototype devices.