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Completed TRL 5 (started at 5, targeting 5)
Mirror coatings are required to reflect X-rays using grazing incidence optics. The best-performing coating for soft X-rays (<10 keV) is a single layer (~10nm) Ir coating. This coating has a high compressive stress, which can when applied to thin mirror substrates (<0.8mm), deform the substrate and add figure deformation to the imaging properties of the X-ray mirror. This is particularly detrimental to arcsecond optics. By applying a tensile Cr layer below the Ir coating in a DC magnetron coating chamber, this stress can be effectively canceled. This project is to calibrate the thickness of the Cr layer needed to cancel the stress and to determine the magnitude of the residual stress that can be obtained by this method.
This investigation is a technology maturation for risk reduction targeted at the production schedule of large, segmented X-ray mirrors. Large-scale manufacturing of mirror segments is needed for the Next Generation X-ray Optics (NGXO) segmented optics, which will typically require the production of several thousands of segments (4000-20,000). It will rely on the efficient and reproducible coating of a large volume of segments to meet the cost and schedule demands. The simplest and most cost-effective way is to use DC magnetron sputtering, which can coat dozens of mirrors in a short time. However this method can result in high coating stresses detrimental to arcsecond optics. The development of a Cr de-stressing layer enables the use of DC-magnetron coating as a very cost-effective alternative.
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