David Attwood (physicist) Created 2026-10-24 Updated 2026-11-05
David Attwood studies the use of diffraction for X-ray microscopy. With Janos Kirz, he authored the X-Ray Data Booklet's account of zone plates: concentric rings select contributions that interfere at a focus. Their treatment connects outer-zone width to spatial resolution and explains why an ideal opaque/transparent zone plate sends only of incident power into its first diffraction order. Resolving a small structure and collecting a useful fraction of the incident X-rays are therefore separate design constraints.[ref]
Zone Plates by Janos Kirz and David Attwood. Section 4.4, zone geometry, resolution and first-order efficiency
Portrait of David Attwood
. External portrait hosted by University of California, Berkeley. Source.