<title>Development of monolithic capillary optics for x-ray diffraction applications</title>

One of the most attractive and potentially useful applications of capillary optics for x rays is conversion of divergent x rays from intense point sources into quasi parallel beams for diffraction applications. This is particularly important for investigation of small samples such as protein crystals. This report reviews the current status of development of monolithic tapered Kumakhov optics for protein structure analysis. Even at this early stage of development, gains of more than 30 compared to optimized systems without the optics have been achieved.