Controlling X‐ray deformable mirrors during inspection

The X‐ray deformable mirror (XDM) is becoming widely used in the present synchrotron/free‐electron laser facilities because of its flexibility in correcting wavefront errors or modification of the beam size at the sample location. Owing to coupling among the N actuators of an XDM, (N + 1) or (2N + 1) scans are required to learn the response of each actuator one by one. When the mirror has an important number of actuators (N) and the actuator response time including stabilization or the necessary metrology time is long, the learning process can be time consuming. In this work, a fast and accurate method is presented to drive an XDM to a target shape usually with only three or four measurements during inspection. The metrology data are used as feedback to calculate the curvature discrepancy between the current and the target shapes. Three different derivative estimation methods are introduced to calculate the curvature from measured data. The mirror shape is becoming close to the target through iterative compensations. The feasibility of this simple and effective approach is demonstrated by a series of experiments.