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This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues.Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. t r a c tA new facility named SPARC_LAB has been recently launched at the INFN National Laboratories in Frascati, merging the potentialities of the former projects SPARC and PLASMONX. We describe in this paper the status and the future perspectives at the SPARC_LAB facility.

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After a brief review of the main areas of research in X-ray optics and an analysis of the development of capillary optics, a general theory of radiation propagation through capillary structures is described in both geometrical optics and wave optics approximations. Analysis of the radiation field structure inside a capillary waveguide shows that wave propagation in channels can be of a purely modal nature, with the transmitted energy mostly concentrated in the immediate neighborhood of the capillary inner walls. A qualitative change in radiation scattering with decreasing channel diameter Ð namely, the transition from surface channeling in microcapillaries to bulk channeling in nanocapillaries Ð is discussed.

New experiments on crystal assisted collimation have been carried out at the CERN SPS with stored beams of 120 GeV/c protons and Pb ions. Bent silicon crystals of 2 mm long with about 170 μrad bend angle and a small residual torsion were used as primary collimators. In channeling conditions, the beam loss rate induced by inelastic interactions of particles with the crystal nuclei is minimal. The loss reduction was about 6 for protons and about 3 for Pb ions. Lower reduction value for Pb ions can be explained by their considerably larger ionization losses in the crystal. In one of the crystals, the measured fraction of the Pb ion beam halo deflected in channeling conditions was 74%, a value very close to that for protons. The intensity of the off-momentum halo leaking out from the collimation station was measured in the first high dispersion area downstream. The particle population in the shadow of the secondary collimator–absorber was considerably smaller in channeling conditions than for amorphous orientations of the crystal. The corresponding reduction was in the range of 2–5 for both protons and Pb ions