Origin of irregular X-ray mirage fringes from a bent, thin crystal

Abstract

The dynamical theory of diffraction is used to analyse irregular X-ray mirage interference fringes observed in Si220 X-ray reflection topography from a weakly bent, thin crystal due to gravity. The origin of the irregular fringes is attributed to the interference between mirage diffracted beams and a reflected beam from the back surface, which is a new type of interference fringe. The irregular fringes are reproduced by calculating the reflected intensities numerically. The effects of absorption and thermal vibration are quite important for the reproduction. The result shows that the interference fringes depend on the strain as well as the thickness of the crystal, which indicates that the fringes should be useful for analysing weak strain in a crystal as an application.