An energy-dispersive spectrometer for the rapid measurement of X-ray absorption spectra using synchrotron radiation

The design and evaluation of an energy-dispersive spectrometer to measure X-ray absorption spectra rapidly using a synchrotron-radiation source is presented. The method employs a cylindrically bent triangular crystal to focus and disperse a quasi-parallel polychromatic X-ray beam onto the sample. The beam passing through the sample then diverges towards an X-ray detector where beam position can be correlated to energy. Both concentrated and dilute samples were measured on X-ray film and with an electronic linear photodiode array detector and the data analysed to determine the resolution obtained and the data quality. This method is shown to provide an efficient way to obtain high-quality EXAFS and absorption-edge data and should permit kinetic studies to be performed on small samples with good counting statistics. The method should find application in the fields of biophysics, chemistry and materials science.