Comment on “A doubly curved elliptical crystal spectrometer for the study of localized x-ray absorption in hot plasmas” [Rev. Sci. Instrum. 85, 103114 (2014)]

The elliptical spectrometer described by Cahill et al. [Rev. Sci. Instrum. 85, 103114 (2014)] is designed to enable absorption X-ray spectroscopy under circumstances in which the object plasma is, itself, a relatively bright X-ray emitter. An implementation of this design was developed using a doubly curved mica crystal for X-ray dispersion. The geometry of the spectrometer was verified by ray tracing calculations assuming Bragg reflection from mica in the second order. Control of X-ray reflections from other orders was an anticipated challenge and has been attempted by means of filtering and control of the source spectrum. These efforts have been found to be insufficient to allow the spectrometer to operate as designed because of the strong fifth order reflection of source radiation by the mica crystal. Potential solutions are presented that may enable a successful implementation of this novel crystal spectrometer design.