Line spread functions of blazed off-plane gratings operated in the Littrow mounting
Abstract
Future soft x-ray (10 to 50 Å) spectroscopy missions require higher effective areas and resolutions to perform critical science that cannot be done by instruments on current missions. An x-ray grating spectrometer employing off-plane reflection gratings would be capable of meeting these performance criteria. Off-plane gratings with blazed groove facets operating in the Littrow mounting can be used to achieve excellent throughput into orders achieving high resolutions. We have fabricated two off-plane gratings with blazed groove profiles via a technique that uses commonly available microfabrication processes, is easily scaled for mass production, and yields gratings customized for a given mission architecture. Both fabricated gratings were tested in the Littrow mounting at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) PANTER x-ray test facility to assess their performance. The line spread functions of diffracted orders were measured, and a maximum resolution of 800±20 is reported. In addition, we also observe evidence of a blaze effect from measurements of relative efficiencies of the diffracted orders.
- Publication:
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Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems
- Pub Date:
- April 2016
- DOI:
- 10.1117/1.JATIS.2.2.025001
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1603.04839
- Bibcode:
- 2016JATIS...2b5001D
- Keywords:
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- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 25 pages including references