Abstract
We investigate how the energy resolution of a grazing incidence backscattering meV-scale monochromator is affected by surface treatment using plasma chemical vapor machining (plasma-CVM). This has been suggested to be less damaging to crystals than other combined etching/polishing processes such a mechano-chemical polishing (MCP). It was observed that the energy resolution improved slightly and became more uniform when plasma-CVM treatment was applied to a crystal finished using the MCP. However, it seems that the underlying crystal quality may have the largest impact on the resolution than plasma-CVM vs MCP.
