9625851 Donahue With this award, we will carry out a comprehensive research program to develop x-ray microbeam diffraction and direct imaging techniques based on Bragg-Fresnel optics. The two main objectives of our development effort are: 1.) to develop high quality Bragg-Fresnel optics by employing the state of the art nanofabrication technologies and thorough theoretical investigation of the optical properties of Bragg- Fresnel lenses (BFL) by computer simulation, with an ultimate goal of producing BFLs with - 50 nm resolution; and 2.) to develop experimental methods for effectively utilizing BFLs in a broad array of x-ray analytical methods widely used in advanced materials and biological research, including x-ray diffraction (e.g., small and macro-molecular crystallography), small angle scattering, nanometer resolution hard x-ray imaging (tomography and microscopy), and nanostructure characterization of electronic materials. By the first year, we will fabricate linear and circular BFLs; during the second year we will design and begin construction of a BFL based x-ray transmission microscope. In the third year we will develop a BFL-based microfluoresence microscope for elemental characterization. %%% We are in a strong position to undertake the development of Bragg-Fresnel optics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. We have access to the unique combination of resources essential to a BFO development program: state of the art x-ray facilities (including access to synchrotron beamlines) for characterizing BFLs and submicron to nanometer microelectronics fabrication facilities (particularly Electron Beam Lithography and reactive ion etching capabilities) for producing the BFLs. These resources are available to us on campus through two NSF supported research centers: the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL) x-ray facility and the Nanotech, the UCSB branch of the National Nanofabrication Users Network (NNUN). ***
