BEaTriX, the Beam Expander Testing X-ray facility for testing ATHENA's SPO modules: the collimating mirror

Abstract

The BEaTriX (Beam Expander Testing X-ray) facility is now under construction at INAF-Brera Astronomical Observatory with the support of ESA. We aim to use it as a pathfinder to demonstrate the feasibility of the acceptance tests of the ATHENA’s Silicon pore optics Mirror Modules (MM), i.e., point spread function and effective area measurements at two energies for all MMs. A microfocus X-ray source placed in the focus of a paraboloid mirror will provide a collimated X-ray beam to the next stages featuring the facility, i.e., the monochromator and the beam expansion units, which will finally enable the full illumination of the mirror modules under test. The collimating mirror has to satisfy severe surface specifications to allow the divergence of the X-ray beam reaching the requirements. Simulations, based on physical optics, have shown that the optical quality of the mirror surface has to reach 0.5 arcsec Half-Energy Width (HEW) at 4.51 keV. We procured a ground and lapped mirror substrate in HOQ 310 fused quartz material. The first step of the process is based on the bonnet polishing technology with our CNC IRP1200 Zeeko machine, and it is guided by the analysis of the metrological data obtained by the optical profilometer present at Media Lario S.r.l. laboratories. The spatial frequency errors not correctable by bonnet polishing can be then removed by smoothing and superpolishing processes, followed by ion beam figuring to correct the remaining errors in the low frequency range. In this paper, we report on the analysis performed to correlate the requirement on beam divergence to the manufacturing tolerances on the surface. We present the manufacturing process and the results so far achieved.