The Advanced Photon Source
a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility

X-Ray Resources

Useful Websites
  • X-Ray Interactions with Matter from CRXO at LBNL. Intuitive interface for x-ray transmission and reflectivity for a wide range of materials.
  • X-Ray Data Booklet from LBNL. Slightly outdated in places, but many useful tables of edge energies, fluorescence lines, and crystal lattice spacings.
  • NIST XCOM Database. Powerful database of photoelectric absorption, elastic scattering, and Compton scattering cross-sections for a wide range of materials.
  • X-Ray Server. Maintained by Sergey Stepanov at GMCA at the APS, this website has several powerful calculators for simulating x-ray reflection and diffraction.
Software
  • X-Ray Oriented Programs (XOP). This program, written by scientists at the ESRF and APS, is widely used in the synchrotron research community. It can be used to model synchrotron sources, filters, mirrors, and crystal optics. It can also accommodate several extensions, which can be used to model multilayer optics and perform optical ray tracing.
  • PyMca. Program for analysis of x-ray fluorescence data, written by researchers at the ESRF.
Books and Papers with Useful Data
  • Elements of Modern X-ray Physics by Als-Nielsen and McMorrow. Very good introduction to synchrotron radiation and x-ray techniques.
  • International Tables for Crystallography. Chapters 4.2 and 6.3 give useful overviews of x-ray sources and x-ray absorption, respectively. The discussion of synchrotron sources in chapter 4.2 is rather outdated.
  • "A Review, Bibliography, and Tabulation of K, L, and Higher Atomic Shell X-Ray Fluorescence Yields," J. H. Hubbell, et al., Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data, v. 23, n. 2, 1994. Reference for fluorescence yields of various elements.