Design of an elliptically bent refocus mirror for the MERLIN beamline at the advanced light source

There is an increasing demand for well-focused beam with high quality imaging of the full field to further explore the potential of novel instruments. For beamlines operating at focal point, mechanical benders have often been used to shape the refocusing mirror into an ideal elliptical cylinder. Unfortunately, the limited number of couplings for these mechanisms requires specific substrate side-shaping, often calculated using beam bending theory [J.H. Underwood, Space Sci. Instrum. 3 (1977) 259; M. Howells et al., Opt. Eng. 39 (2000) 2748; T. Warwick et al., Document available at OSTI website: http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/servlets/purl/842557-JYZCS3/native/], to meet demanding figure requirements. Here, we use finite element analysis (FEA) to validate the side-shaping algorithm and then couple the output with SHADOW to evaluate mirror performance when an ideal ellipse is not achieved. Published by Elsevier B.V.