Nanomirrors that bend X-ray beams may lead to improved space telescopes
12 Jun 2008, 1327 Hrs

Add comment          Mail          Print          Write to Editor

 

Washington, June 12 (ANI): Researchers at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in the US have developed nanomirrors that can help to bend X-ray beams, leading to greatly improved space telescopes, as well new tools for biology and for the manufacture of semiconductor chips. X-rays from space provide astronomers with important information about the most exotic events and objects in our universe, such as dark energy, black holes and neutron stars.

But X-rays are notoriously difficult to collect and many interesting cosmic sources are faint, which makes collecting these high-energy rays difficult and time-consuming, even with telescopes on satellites far above our X-ray-absorbing atmosphere.

Now a group of researchers from MIT has fabricated a new, highly efficient nanoscale Venetian-blind-like device that contains thousands of ultrasmooth mirror slats per millimeter for use in future improved space-based X-ray telescopes.

The so-called Critical- Angle Transmission (CAT) gratings feature dense arrays of tens-of- nanometer-thin, freely suspended silicon structures that serve as efficient mirrors for the reflection and diffraction of nanometer- wavelength light-otherwise known as X-rays.

New instrument designs based on these gratings could also lead to advances in fields beyond astrophysics, from plasma physics to the life and environmental sciences, as well as in extreme ultraviolet lithography, a technology of interest to the semiconductor industry.

The concept behind CAT gratings might also open new avenues for devices in neutron optics and for the diffraction of electrons, atoms and molecules.

Motivated by technology goals for NASA's next-generation X-ray telescope, called Constellation-X, the new devices promise to improve more than five-fold upon the efficiency of the transmission gratings on board NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

The reason for this improvement lies in the fact that in the new design, X-rays are reflected very efficiently at very shallow angles-akin to skipping stones on water-from the sub-nanometer-smooth sidewalls of the silicon slats, through the spaces between the slats.

The silicon slats-as thin as 35 nanometers, which is comparable to the smallest feature sizes still under development in commercial computer chip manufacturing-are parallel to each other and separated by as little as about 150 nanometers.

The slats have to extend many micrometers in the remaining two dimensions.

"Imagine a thin, 40-foot- long, 8-foot-tall mirror, with surface roughness below a tenth of a millimeter," said Heilmann.

"Then put tens of thousands of these mirrors next to each other, each spaced precisely an inch from the next. Now shrink the whole assembly-including the roughness-down by a factor of a million, and you have a good CAT grating," he added.

Recent X-ray test results from a prototype device, obtained with the help of Eric Gullikson of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, confirmed that it met theoretical expectations. (ANI)