The inner surface roughness of a capillary is investigated by the reflectivity of x-rays penetrating through the capillary. The results are consistent with the data from atomic force microscope (AFM). The roughness measured by this new method can reach the order of angstroms with high quality capillaries.

This paper develops a simulation program for x-ray transmission in an ellipsoidal capillary based on a ray-tracing method. The influence of the parameters of ellipsoidal capillary and x-ray energy on transmission efficiency, full width at half maximum and power density gain of x-ray beams through an ellipsoidal capillary was analysed by this program. It shows that the particular rules of the ellipsoidal capillary x-ray lens are different from the polycapillary lens. Furthermore, this analysis method can be applied to the optimized design of ellipsoidal capillary.