Over the past decade, the advances in grating-based soft X-ray spectrometers have revolutionized\nthe soft X-ray spectroscopies in materials research. However, these novel spectrometers are mostly\ndedicated designs, which cannot be easily adopted for applications with diverging demands. Here we\npresent a versatile spectrometer design concept based on the Hettrick-Underwood optical scheme that\nuses modular mechanical components. The spectrometerââ?¬â?¢s optics chamber can be used with gratings\noperated in either inside or outside orders, and the detector assembly can be reconfigured accordingly.\nThe spectrometer can be designed to have high spectral resolution, exceeding 10 000 resolving\npower when using small source (âË?¼1 Ã?¼m) and detector pixels (âË?¼5 Ã?¼m) with high line density gratings\n(âË?¼3000 lines/mm), or high throughput at moderate resolution.We report two such spectrometers with\nslightly different design goals and optical parameters in this paper.We show that the spectrometer with\nhigh throughput and large energy window is particularly useful for studying the sustainable energy\nmaterials. We demonstrate that the extensive resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) map of battery\ncathode material LiNi1/3Co1/3Mn1/3O2 can be produced in few hours using such a spectrometer.\nUnlike analyzing only a handful of RIXS spectra taken at selected excitation photon energies across the\nelemental absorption edges to determine various spectral features like the localized dd excitations and\nnon-resonant fluorescence emissions, these features can be easily identified in the RIXS maps. Studying\nsuch RIXS maps could reveal novel transition metal redox in battery compounds that are sometimes\nhard to be unambiguously identified in X-ray absorption and emission spectra. We propose that this\nmodular spectrometer design can serve as the platform for further customization to meet specific\nscientific demands.
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