Production of silicon pore optics

摘要

New astronomical science missions demand X-ray telescopes with an angular resolution better than 5" and effective areas of up to 5 m² at 1 keV. Traditional technologies like nickel electro-forming or polished glass surfaces lead to long and heavy structures, which require prohibitive mass resources to achieve the required large collecting area. To overcome this problem an entirely novel technology using silicon wafers has been developed resulting in pore X-ray optics, which form very light, stiff and modular structures. The suitability of silicon wafers to be used as high quality optical material has been demonstrated and semiconductor industry have developed methods to structure the wafers such, that they can be assembled into segments of Wolter-I optics. For the assembly of these, so called High Performance Pore Optics (HPO), we have developed an automated production robot. The assembly process and 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 their performance when measured in synchrotron radiation facilities.