Janos Kirz and Michael Feser contributed to this chapter.

The first x-ray microscopes were one-of-a-kind instruments that were operated by their builders, in a tradition that continues to this day. Although there was a brief phase in the 1950s where commercial point-projection microscopes were available (see Section 6.2, and [Cosslett 1960, Plates IX.B and X]), up until the year 2000 essentially all microscopes were custom-built. These custom-built microscopes are now joined by commercial instruments offering a wide range of capabilities. No matter whether you are using a commercial instrument where you can pop a sample in and push a button to get an image, or a custom instrument, it is useful to understand what “makes it tick.” Hence this chapter. Section 7.1 discusses x-ray sources, while Section 7.2 discusses the optical transport systems and associated equipment needed to bring the x-ray beam to the imaging system. After some brief comments on nanopositioning systems in Section 7.3, the properties of several types of x-ray detectors are covered in Section 7.4. Finally, Section 7.5 provides a short introduction to specimen environments.

The degree of sophistication in modern x-ray microscopes is worth a moment's pause for thanks. It wasn't always so! What is available today makes the home-built system (Fig. 2.4) that the author first encountered look unbelievably crude, and at that point things had already made significant advances from earlier years [Kirz 1980c, Rarback 1980]. An amusing anecdote was presented by Arne Engström in 1980 [Engström 1980] as he looked back on four decades of work in x-ray microscopy: