Design and development of grazing incidence x-ray mirrors

Abstract

X-ray pulsar navigation has attracted extensive attentions from academy and engineering domains. The navigation accuracy is can be enhanced through design of X-ray mirrors to focus X-rays to a small detector. The Wolter-I optics, originally proposed based on a paraboloid mirror and a hyperboloid mirror for X-ray imaging, has long been widely developed and employed in X-ray observatory. Some differences, however, remain in the requirements on optics between astronomical X-ray observation and pulsar navigation. The simplified Wolter-I optics, providing single reflection by a paraboloid mirror, is more suitable for pulsar navigation. In this paper, therefore, the grazing incidence X-ray mirror was designed further based on our previous work, with focus on the reflectivity, effective area, angular resolution and baffles. To evaluate the performance of the manufactured mirror, the surface roughness and reflectivity were tested. The test results show that the grazing incidence mirror meets the design specifications. On the basis of this, the reflectivity of the mirror in the working bandwidth was extrapolated to evaluate the focusing ability of the mirror when it works together with the detector. The purpose of our current work to design and develop a prototype mirror was realized. It can lay a foundation and provide guidance for the development of multilayer nested X-ray mirror with larger effective area.