Reactive Ion Etching
One way of focusing intense beams of x-rays down to individual nanometers involves bending them through the stacks of atomically thin materials inside multilayer Laue lenses. These drop-like domes were carved through a process called reactive ion etching, which produced the striped bubbles in this false-colored electron microscope capture. Each dark line signified a marker layer built into these ultra precise lenses. This flawed prototype—the final lenses actually look much more like symmetrical towers—helped scientists perfect the synthesis process and prepare lenses to focus x-rays to within a single nanometer using instruments like Brookhaven’s forthcoming National Synchrotron Light Source II.
Reactive Ion Etching
One way of focusing intense beams of x-rays down to individual nanometers involves bending them through the stacks of atomically thin materials inside multilayer Laue lenses. These drop-like domes were carved through a process called reactive ion etching, which produced the striped bubbles in this false-colored electron microscope capture. Each dark line signified a marker layer built into these ultra precise lenses. This flawed prototype—the final lenses actually look much more like symmetrical towers—helped scientists perfect the synthesis process and prepare lenses to focus x-rays to within a single nanometer using instruments like Brookhaven’s forthcoming National Synchrotron Light Source II.