Astrophysics laboratory

Department of Physics, Ferrara University

Our optical bench has been developed to work mainly with monochromatic X-rays. This feature permits to study physical properties connected with X-ray radiation of materials as a function of the incident radiation energy. This way we can understand, for example, what is the transmission coefficient at various energy, the diffracting power or the orientation of a crystalline sample and eventual crystal defects.
Using a well defined energy helps to determine with high accuracy the respons of X-ray optics. For this reason our facility was chosen to test several important X-ray instruments mounted on BeppoSAX and INTEGRAL satellites.

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