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Just an interesting question of semantics that annoyingly comes up  
from time to time when people are comparing x-ray beam diameters.

What counts as "microbeam?"

Of course "micro" has the precise meaning in SI as being a factor of  
10^-6.
The problem is that the prefix "micro" just means "extremely small"  
in common usage.

The term is used very confusingly everywhere. Take microwaves.  
Microwaves have wavelengths from 1 millimeter to 1 meter. Go figure.  
They're just "extremely small" radio waves.

Now I believe that it is more widely accepted that "nanofabrication"  
is making objects that are measured in nanometers.

So shouldn't microbeams rightly be x-ray beams with diameters  
measured in microns (i.e. < 1 mm and >= 1 micron). Of course this  
makes all crystallography beams microbeams and everything smaller  
than 1 micron a nanobeam. That won't be popular.

I've always called anything smaller than 50 microns microbeam because  
that's about as small of an aperture-based collimator as we could  
make. So a user should ask for "microbeam" if regular collimator is  
too large.

I was always puzzled at the APS habit of calling this "minibeam", but  
it's starting to sound better all the time.

But in practice, I think "microbeam" sometimes means "smaller beam  
than yours." So microbeam used to be 30 microns, 10 or 5, now maybe 1  
micron. Pretty soon no microbeam at all.

I think maybe I'll stick with "small", "smaller than usual", and  
someday "extremely small."

I'd love to hear people's opinion on the topic.


Richard Gillilan
MacCHESS