The Use of Synchrotron Radiation as an Absolute Source of VUV Radiation

Synchrotron radiation has been used as a standard source to calibrate spectrographic instruments at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS). Conceptually it is straightforward to apply the calculable continuum distribution of synchrotron radiation to problems requiring a source of known irradiance if the electron energy, the radius of the electron orbit, and the beam current are known. In practice many factors affect the accuracy of such a calibration, such as temporal and spatial variations in the electron beam, uncertainties in the orbital radius and maximum energy of the orbiting electron beam. These sources of error are discussed and the method of calibration on SURF-I is specified. A storage ring synchrotron radiation facility (SURF-II) is now operational at NBS. The calibration techniques developed for SURF-I are applied to SURF-II with anticipated improvements in calibration accuracy. For SURF-I the incident flux was determined with an accuracy of 15 percent while for SURF-II we anticipate accuracies of about 7 percent.