Recent advances in the alignment of silicon mirrors for high-resolution x-ray optics

Recent advances in the fabrication of segmented silicon mirrors make it possible to build large-area, lightweight, high-resolution x-ray telescopes with arc-second angular resolution. To build such a telescope, we fabricate accurate silicon mirrors and develop alignment and bonding techniques to precisely align and integrate these silicon mirror segments into modular units. In this way, the processes of mirror fabrication, mirror alignment and bonding, and subsequent integration into units of successive larger scale are completely independent, and their technologies can be developed independently. In this paper, we present recent improvement in the precision of optical alignment and mirror bonding. We discuss the measurement of the mirror’s focusing in a parallel optical beam and address the practical challenges in bonding these mirrors into modules as an intermediate step to build up a full-scale telescope for space missions.