Adaptive lobster-eye hard x-ray telescope with high-angular resolution and wide field of view

Victor Grubsky; Michael Gertsenshteyn; Keith Shoemaker; Tomasz Jannson

doi:10.1117/12.735923

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20 September 2007 Adaptive lobster-eye hard x-ray telescope with high-angular resolution and wide field of view

Victor Grubsky, Michael Gertsenshteyn, Keith Shoemaker, Tomasz Jannson

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Proceedings Volume 6688, Optics for EUV, X-Ray, and Gamma-Ray Astronomy III; 66880P (2007) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.735923
Event: Optical Engineering + Applications, 2007, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

High-resolution, wide-field-of-view hard X-ray telescopes are essential for detecting and studying cosmic sources in the 10-100 keV photon energy band, which are typically inaccessible to conventional Wolter I X-ray telescopes. To focus such high-energy photons, we developed special Lobster-Eye optics consisting of multiple reflective channels with square cross sections, which are formed by intersecting two sets of semiconductor-grade gold-coated flat silicon elements. Reflective channels with square cross sections The presented hard X-ray Lobster-Eye telescope lens designed for the 10-80 keV energy band consists of approximately 100 channels in both the horizontal and the vertical directions, with the angle between the adjacent plates being less than 1'. An array of such lenses, in which the orientation of each lens is independently controlled, can be used as an adaptive X-ray focusing device capable of changing its imaging properties depending on the user-selected mode. In the wide-angle operation, the individual lenses are aligned toward a common center to form a lobster-eye lens with a large (~2°) field of view, which would be suitable for monitoring stellar or galactic X-ray bursts. For observing a specific event, the telescope can be switched to the high-sensitivity mode by aligning the axes of the individual lenses in parallel so that they are all pointing to the region of interest, effectively adding up the effective areas of individual lenses (up to ~1600 cm² at 40 keV). In the paper we will discuss the system performance simulations and the experimental results using initial prototype Lobster-Eye lenses.

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Victor Grubsky, Michael Gertsenshteyn, Keith Shoemaker, and Tomasz Jannson "Adaptive lobster-eye hard x-ray telescope with high-angular resolution and wide field of view", Proc. SPIE 6688, Optics for EUV, X-Ray, and Gamma-Ray Astronomy III, 66880P (20 September 2007); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.735923

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