Stacking of Silicon Pore Optics for IXO
2009
Silicon pore optics is a technology developed to enable future large area X-ray telescopes, such as the International Xray
Observatory (IXO), a candidate mission in the ESA Space Science Programme 'Cosmic Visions 2015-2025'. IXO
uses nested mirrors in Wolter-I configuration to focus grazing incidence X-ray photons on a detector plane. The IXO
mirrors will have to meet stringent performance requirements including an effective area of ~3 m 2 at 1.25 keV and ~1 m 2
at 6 keV and angular resolution better than 5 arc seconds. To achieve the collecting area requires a total polished mirror
surface area of ~1300 m 2 with a surface roughness better than 0.5 nm rms. By using commercial high-quality 12" silicon
wafers which are diced, structured, wedged, coated, bent and stacked the stringent performance requirements of IXO can
be attained without any costly polishing steps. Two of these stacks are then assembled into a co-aligned mirror module,
which is a complete X-ray imaging system. Included in the mirror module are the isostatic mounting points, providing a
reliable interface to the telescope. Hundreds of such mirror modules are finally integrated into petals, and mounted onto
the spacecraft to form an X-ray optic of four meters in diameter.
In this paper we will present the silicon pore optics assembly process and latest X-ray results. The required metrology is
described in detail and experimental methods are shown, which allow to assess the quality of the HPOs during
production and to predict the performance when measured in synchrotron radiation facilities.
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