From NewAthena to Gamma-Ray Lenses: The Potential of Silicon Pore Optics with Nicolas Barrière

NewAthena has been endorsed by the European Space Agency (ESA) as one of its next-generation flagship missions, with a launch planned for 2037. Over the past two decades, ESA, cosine, and partners have been developing Silicon Pore Optics (SPO) to enable large space-borne X-ray observatories such as NewAthena. Leveraging semiconductor industry techniques, thin mirror plates are fabricated from commercial silicon wafers and assembled into mirror modules through a scalable mass-production process. SPO is a key enabling technology for NewAthena, which will feature a 2.6-meter diameter aperture composed of up to 600 co-aligned modules.
The potential of SPO extends well beyond NewAthena, and we are only beginning to explore its capabilities. Thanks to their extremely low surface roughness (0.1 nm RMS), the mirror plates are excellent substrates for multilayer coatings, enabling the fabrication of hard X-ray optics, for example when combined with the Kirkpatrick-Baez optical design. To further extend the bandpass, the crystal lattice of the plates can be used for diffraction, allowing the stacked plates to form self-supporting Laue lens elements capable of focusing soft gamma rays both azimuthally and radially. In this talk, I will provide an overview and status update on the development of the optics for NewAthena. I will then discuss the exciting new possibilities that SPO technology is opening up for future ground-based and space-based applications.

Sponsored by the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.