Shearing x-ray interferometer with an x-ray prism

A wave front dividing interferometer was devised in which half of a highly spatially coherent beam deflected by an x-ray prism is overlapped with another half. By placing the samples in the two beams and the x-ray imaging detector closely downstream of the sample, the differential phase of the sample is recorded on the imaging detector. The separation of the two paths at the sample plane, the amount of shear, was 2.2 mum in the present experiment. This is easily controllable by changing the distance between the sample and the imaging detector. Phase retrieval using the fringe scanning method was successfully demonstrated for various kinds of weakly absorbing samples. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.