HERMES: a soft X-ray beamline dedicated to X-ray microscopy.

The HERMES beamline (High Efficiency and Resolution beamline dedicated to X-ray Microscopy and Electron Spectroscopy), built at Synchrotron SOLEIL (Saint-Auban, France), is dedicated to soft X-ray microscopy. The beamline combines two complementary microscopy methods: XPEEM (X-ray Photo Emitted Electron Microscopy) and STXM (Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy) with an aim to reach spatial resolution below 20 nm and to fully exploit the local spectroscopic capabilities of the two microscopes. The availability of the two methods within the same beamline enables the users to select the appropriate approach to study their specific case in terms of sample environment, spectroscopy methods, probing depth etc. In this paper a general description of the beamline and its design are presented. The performance and specifications of the beamline will be reviewed in detail. Moreover, the article is aiming to demonstrate how the beamline performances have been specifically optimized to fulfill the specific requirements of a soft X-ray microscopy beamline in terms of flux, resolution, beam size etc. Special attention has been dedicated to overcome some limiting and hindering problems that are usually encountered on soft X-ray beamlines such as carbon contamination, thermal stability and spectral purity.