Kavli Affiliate: Eric D. Miller
| First 5 Authors: Eric D. Miller, James A. Gregory, Marshall W. Bautz, Harry R. Clark, Michael Cooper
| Summary:
Future X-ray astrophysics missions will survey large areas of the sky with
unparalleled sensitivity, enabled by lightweight, high-resolution optics. These
optics inherently produce curved focal surfaces with radii as small as 2 m,
requiring a large area detector system that closely conforms to the curved
focal surface. We have embarked on a project using a curved charge-coupled
device (CCD) detector technology developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory to provide
large-format, curved detectors for such missions, improving performance and
simplifying design. We present the current status of this work, which aims to
curve back-illuminated, large-format (5 cm x 4 cm) CCDs to 2.5-m radius and
confirm X-ray performance. We detail the design of fixtures and the curving
process, and present intial results on curving bare silicon samples and monitor
devices and characterizing the surface geometric accuracy. The tests meet our
accuracy requirement of <5 $mu$m RMS surface non-conformance for samples of
similar thickness to the functional detectors. We finally show X-ray
performance measurements of planar CCDs that will serve as a baseline to
evaluate the curved detectors. The detectors exhibit low noise, good
charge-transfer efficiency, and excellent, uniform spectroscopic performance,
including in the important soft X-ray band.
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