Presentation details
» Kirkpatrick-Baez Silicon Stacks for IXO or similar applications
Presentation duration: 20 minutes
Presenter: Richard Willingale
A method of constructing a large aperture grazing incidence X-ray telescope utilising the Kirkpatrick-Baez geometry is described. Two crossed stacks of flat, wedged silicon plates comprise a single optical unit which provides focusing to a limit set by the plate separation within the stacks. If high precision silicon wafers are used and the focal length is large an angular resolution of a few arc second will be achievable. A tesselation of a large number of nearly identical stacks over a spherical aperture plane can provide a very large collecting area suitable for the IXO mission or similar X-ray astronomy applications. As a refinement an angular resolution at the limit imposed by the Kirkpatrick-Baez geometry could be met if the plates were very slightly curved to the correct parabolic profile along the axial direction.
Authors:- Richard Willingale
- Frank Spaan