Room temperature magnetic refrigeration is an energy saving and environmentally‐friendly technology, which has developed rapidly from a basic idea to prototype devices. The performance of magnetic refrigerators crucially depends on the magnetocaloric properties and the geometry of the employed refrigerants. Here we review the magnetocaloric properties of Heusler alloys and related compounds with a high surface to volume ratio such as films, ribbons, and microwires, and compare them with their bulk counterparts.

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We demonstrate that ion-beam lithography can be applied to the fabrication of rotationally parabolic refractive diamond X-ray micro-lenses that are of interest to the field of high-resolution X-ray focusing and microscopy. Three single half-lenses with curvature radii of 4.8 µm were produced and stacked to form a compound refractive lens, which provided diffraction-limited focusing of X-ray radiation at the P14 beamline of PETRA-III (DESY). As shown with SEM, the lenses are free of expressed low- and high-frequency shape modulations with a figure error of < 200 nm and surface roughness of 30 nm. Precise micro-manipulation and stacking of individual lenses are demonstrated, which opens up new opportunities for compact X-ray microscopy with nanometer resolution.

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