1. Performance Testing of a Large-Format X-ray Reflection Grating Prototype for a Suborbital Rocket Payload.
- Author
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Donovan, Benjamin D., McEntaffer, Randall L., DeRoo, Casey T., Tutt, James H., Grisé, Fabien, Eichfeld, Chad M., Gall, Oren Z., Burwitz, Vadim, Hartner, Gisela, Pelliciari, Carlo, and Caria, Marlis-Madeleine La
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X-ray reflection , *SPECTROMETERS , *PROBABILITY theory , *ELECTRON beam lithography , *FABRICATION (Manufacturing) - Abstract
The soft X-ray grating spectrometer on board the Off-plane Grating Rocket Experiment (OGRE) hopes to achieve the highest resolution soft X-ray spectrum of an astrophysical object when it is launched via suborbital rocket. Paramount to the success of the spectrometer are the performance of the > 2 5 0 reflection gratings populating its reflection grating assembly. To test current grating fabrication capabilities, a grating prototype for the payload was fabricated via electron-beam lithography at The Pennsylvania State University's Materials Research Institute and was subsequently tested for performance at Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics' PANTER X-ray Test Facility. Bayesian modeling of the resulting data via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling indicated that the grating achieved the OGRE single-grating resolution requirement of R g (λ ∕ Δ λ) > 4 5 0 0 at the 94% confidence level. The resulting R g posterior probability distribution suggests that this confidence level is likely a conservative estimate though, since only a finite R g parameter space was sampled and the model could not constrain the upper bound of R g to less than infinity. Raytrace simulations of the tested system found that the observed data can be reproduced with a grating performing at R g = ∞. It is therefore postulated that the behavior of the obtained R g posterior probability distribution can be explained by a finite measurement limit of the system and not a finite limit on R g . Implications of these results and improvements to the test setup are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2020
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