Development of a multilayer supermirror for hard x-ray telescopes

Abstract

We present a current status of the development of hard x-ray telescope using Pt/C multilayer supermirror. The telescope system is to be made by combining thin foil replication technology for high throughput mirror and multilayer supermirror coating technology for hard x-ray reflection. After the successful multilayer coating on the replica foil mirror, we made the performance demonstration model of this type of telescope, having 20 replica foil supermirrors, 10 primary and 10 secondary reflectors, with focal length of 4.75 m and radius of 100 mm. Pt/C multilayer supermirror structure was designed and optimized to have high and flat reflectivity for x-ray energy from 25 through 40 keV. After some efforts to avoid heat damage of replica foil mirror during the deposition process of multilayer by DC sputtering system, we could establish the fabrication method of supermirror structure on replica foil mirror. Based on the x-ray measurement, we found that this demonstration model showed the half power diameter of 1.9 arcmin for had x-rays and nearly the same reflectivity and energy band width as expected. In this paper, we present the design of graded multilayer as the supermirror, the fabrication and the performance of this demonstration model.