Starts at: 2025-03-01 10:45AM
Ends at: 2025-03-01 12:00PM
Abstract:
Prior to the development of optical systems, it’s essential to understand their potential performance, often allowing for easier testing of ideas and a smoother development process. The performance of grazing incidence optical systems, used to collect x-rays, is generally less understood than that of most optical systems. Thus, this research focuses on understanding and modeling the energy performance of grazing incidence mirrors as a step towards developing a grazing incidence telescope design system to assist in the development of grazing incidence optics. Currently, this work will assist in the development of metrics for the Lynx X-Ray Observatory: a novel x-ray system with the capability of achieving 10 times the effective area of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory at an equivalent or better resolution. Multiple linear regression and beta regression were used to generate a model for reflectivity given grazing angles of 0$^\circ$ to 2.5$^\circ$ and energies of 0.5 to 10 keV based on data from the Center for X-Ray Optics – X-Ray Database. The chosen model was then applied to data on grazing incidence mirror shells to calculate their reflectivity and thus effective area. Effective area was then analyzed as a function of energy and radius. It was found that energies of 0.5 to 10 keV and radii of 10 to 150 cm yielded effective areas of 0.03 to 220 cm$^2$. In general, lower energies and higher radii resulted in a higher effective area. Specifically, it was observed that effective area decreases rapidly as energy increases and decreases more steadily as radii decreases. Following this work, a ray tracing program for Wolter-I type optics is to be developed as the next step toward developing a grazing incidence telescope design system. This work is supported by the NSF REU solar physics program at SAO, grant number AGS-2244112.