Collimating/focusing optical system designed for hard X-ray communication

Abstract A collimating/focusing (C/F) optical system could greatly reduce the power requirements and improve the communication performance in space communication. Based on the known X-ray source, this paper proposed a hard X-ray multilayer collimating/focusing optical system for X-ray communication (XCOM) in 10–30 keV region. The C/F optical system helps effectively realize XCOM with high gain and high signal to noise ratio (SNR) hundreds of kilometers away. This paper discusses the reflectivity of multilayers, the optimization of supermirrors, the design of C/F optical system for hard X-ray, and the ray tracing process. Results shows that the collection efficiency of hard X-ray is greatly improved, and still remains 0.0196% 1000 km away from the X-ray source. When the transmitting power of X-ray is 100 W, the SNR reaches 71.8 dB at 100 km and 50.1 dB at 1000 km, respectively. This work provides some theoretical and actual values for improving the practical application of X-ray communication in entry blackout and space exploration.