Super-smooth processing x-ray telescope application research based on the magnetorheological finishing (MRF) technology

Abstract

Nickel is the unique material in the X-ray telescopes. And it has the typical soft material characteristics with low hardness、high surface damage and low stability of thermal. The traditional fabrication techniques are exposed to lots of problems, including great surface scratches, high sub-surface damage and poor surface roughness and so on. The current fabrication technology for the nickel aspheric mainly adopt the single point diamond turning(SPDT), which has lots of advantages such as high efficiency, ultra-precision surface figure, low sub-surface damage and so on. But the residual surface texture of SPDT will cause great scattering losses and fall far short from the requirement in the X-ray applications. This paper mainly investigates the magnetorheological finishing (MRF) techniques for the super-smooth processing on the nickel optics. Through the study of the MRF polishing techniques, we obtained the ideal super-smooth polishing technique based on the self-controlled MRF-fluid NS-1, and finished the high-precision surface figure lower than RMS λ/80 (λ=632.8nm) and super-smooth roughness lower than Ra 0.3nm on the plane reflector and roughness lower than Ra 0.4nm on the convex cone. The studying of the MRF techniques makes a great effort to the state-of-the-art nickel material processing level for the X-ray optical systems applications.