Astrophysics laboratory

Department of Physics, Ferrara University

Our optical bench was developed to work mainly with monochromatic X-rays. This feature allows us to study physical properties connected with X-ray radiation of materials as a function of the incident radiation energy. This way we can measure, for example, the transmission coefficients at various energies, the diffracting power or the orientation of a crystalline sample, as well as potential crystal defects.
Using a well defined energy helps us to determine with high accuracy the response function of X-ray optics. For this reason our facility was chosen to test several important X-ray instruments which flew aboard BeppoSAX and are currently used aboard the INTEGRAL satellite.

Monochromatic X-rays are obtained through double diffraction from mosaic crystals: depending on the orientation of crystals we can select only photons in a very narrow band.