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A soft X-ray beam-splitting multilayer optic for the NASA GEMS Bragg Reflection Polarimeter

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Abstract

A soft X-ray, beam-splitting, multilayer optic has been developed for the Bragg Reflection Polarimeter (BRP) on the NASA Gravity and Extreme Magnetism Small Explorer Mission (GEMS). The optic is designed to reflect 0.5 keV X-rays through a \(90^{\circ }\) angle to the BRP detector, and transmit 2–10 keV X-rays to the primary polarimeter. The transmission requirement prevents the use of a thick substrate, so a 2 μm thick polyimide membrane was used. Atomic force microscopy has shown the membrane to possess high spatial frequency roughness less than 0.2 nm rms, permitting adequate X-ray reflectance. A multilayer thin film was especially developed and deposited via magnetron sputtering with reflectance and transmission properties that satisfy the BRP requirements and with near-zero stress. Reflectance and transmission measurements of BRP prototype elements closely match theoretical predictions, both before and after rigorous environmental testing.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Bruce Lairson of Luxel Corp. for providing helpful advice, many polyimide samples for analysis, and confocal microscope data. We also thank Steve McBride for use of his thermal cycling chamber, and John Tomsick for making the arrangements. Ryan Allured and Philip Kaaret are grateful to Takashi Okajima and Yang Soong at GSFC for guidance during the early stages of reflector development. We acknowledge that nearly all of our multilayer modeling was made possible with David Windt’s IMD software. This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC52-07NA27344 and by the University of California Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC03-76F00098. The Advanced Light Source is supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. Ryan Allured and Philip Kaaret acknowledge partial support from NASA grant NNX08AY58G.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

    Ryan Allured & Philip Kaaret

  2. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, USA

    Mónica Fernández-Perea, Regina Soufli, Jennifer B. Alameda & Michael J. Pivovaroff

  3. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Eric M. Gullikson

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  1. Ryan Allured
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  2. Mónica Fernández-Perea
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  3. Regina Soufli
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  4. Jennifer B. Alameda
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  5. Michael J. Pivovaroff
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  6. Eric M. Gullikson
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  7. Philip Kaaret
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Correspondence to Ryan Allured.

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Allured, R., Fernández-Perea, M., Soufli, R. et al. A soft X-ray beam-splitting multilayer optic for the NASA GEMS Bragg Reflection Polarimeter. Exp Astron 36, 371–388 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10686-013-9337-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10686-013-9337-2

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