Determination of the Exact Orientation of Single-Crystal X-ray Optics from Its Glitch Spectrum and Modeling of Glitches for an Arbitrary Configuration
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors,
Very nice article. I have a few notes that you should pay attention to. Please find a file with the notes. Even though I'm not a native speaker, I recommend improving English.
Best regards
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.doc
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript “Determination of the exact orientation of single-crystal X-ray optics from its glitch spectrum and modeling of glitches for an arbitrary configuration” describes a methodology to accurately determine the crystallographic orientation and the unit cell parameters of single-crystal optics elements, by exploiting glitch spectra. A collection of experimental measurement allowed the authors to demonstrate the correctness of their algorithm of identification of the glitch positions, of their algorithm of crystallographic indexing and of a simulation algorithm, that allows the prediction of glitches at any energy.
I found the paper extremely interesting, providing both a solid theoretical description and an exhaustive experimental validation of the developed methodology. For these reasons, I recommend the paper for publication, after addressing a few minor observations and recommendations:
- Despite the fact that I am not a native English speaker, I found that the paper is occasionally marred by an unidiomatic use of English and wrong punctuation. I would hope that the authors would be able to avail themselves of some expert editing help.
- Page 4, row 153. I could not understand what exactly the “upper envelope” of the resulting spectra is. I suggest using a different term or to provide a formula, as well.
- Page 5, rows 164-168 contain not necessary details.
- Page 5, rows 176-183: The text contain a pretty generic description of an algorithm that is described again in more detail in the immediately following text (page 6, rows 188-201). I suggest eliminating this part and leave the detailed description only.
- Page 7, Figure 5: the light green lines and characters are very hard to read.
- Page 7, row 220: the UC (unit cell) abbreviation is not defined before. The text should be: “…for given unit cell (UC) parameters and incident angles…”
- Page 7, row 229: we discover here that the described methodology is valid for cubic crystals only. This is not a limitation at all, since the large majority of optical elements that are the topic of this paper are made with materials with a cubic lattice, but it should be told more explicitly, at the beginning of the paper.
- Page 8, rows 236-250: I suggest adding formulas to help the reader in understanding the described calculation of the error.
- Page 8, row 252: the meaning of “brute-force” should be more explicit. Details should be added.
- Page 9, row 283: I would avoid the expression “it is obvious”.
- Page 14, Figure 12 is totally unreadable (even more confusing when printed in B/W). Being functional to the important conclusions in the next page (page 15, rows 352-366), it should be limited to just a few crystallographic directions (maybe families of planes like in the Warren plots?), avoiding colors code (use lines of different type: straight, dotted, etc.).
- A general comment about the figures containing the glitch spectra is that they are very hard to read. I suggest replacing them with tables, showing, for each crystallographic direction (or a significant sample of them), both the glitch position found by the algorithm and the same position calculated by the simulation, and their difference (no quantitative comparison between measurements and simulation is present anywhere else in the paper). One or two spectra should then be shown in a figure as an example, to let the reader understand which kind of experimental data has been used.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.doc
