Third generation synchrotron light sources are characterized by a low emittance and a low emittance coupling. Some light sources are already operating with extremely low coupling close to 0.1%. Measurement of the transverse beam size is generally used to measure the emittance and the coupling. To this end, several systems are currently used and an x-ray pinhole camera is one of them. In this paper we derive the point spread function of the x-ray pinhole camera both analytically and numerically using the Fresnel diffraction integral and taking into account the broadband spectrum of the bending magnet source, and we show that an optimized design allows the measurement of extremely small vertical beam sizes below $5\mu \mathrm{m}$. The point spread function of several scintillator screens is also measured, and it shows that the contribution of the diffraction and the screen point spread functions have to be taken into account for an accurate measurement of a low coupling. Finally, we show measurements of the vertical beam sizes as small as $6\mu \mathrm{m}$ for our nonoptimized setup.

• Received 30 January 2009

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTAB.13.022805

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