• Grisé, Fabien
• Mccurdy, Ross
• Lavellee, Guy
• Eichfeld, Chad
• Labella, Michael
• Mccoy, Jake
• Miles, Drew
• Zhang, Ningxiao

Abstract

High-performance spectrographs on-board upcoming missions will play an important role in addressing key questions raised in the 2010 decadal survey. The spectrographs will need to have large effective areas and be able to make high-resolution measurements of faint astronomical objects within the constraints of space-based missions. We will present our ongoing nanofabrication efforts to produce high-efficiency, high-resolution UV and X-ray reflection gratings for future NASA suborbital rocket, explorer, and large class missions. These include: optimizing electron beam lithography to better control groove parameters such as plateau size, pitch, and line edge roughness; directional ion milling to anisotropically etch a custom blazed profile into a laminar grating; thermally activated selective topography equilibrium, which creates a blazed profile by heating three dimensional staircase structures written in resist using greyscale electron beam lithography past their glass transition temperature to flow into a blazed profile; and studying the effects of potassium hydroxide etching on groove parameters. Other work includes studying how to produce a large number of grating replicas from a master grating using ultraviolet nanoimprint lithography or substrate conformal imprint lithography and testing an optical bench setup that measures grating groove density to verify it follows a radial profile....

Topics

• density
• grinding
• glass
• glass
• milling
• Potassium
• glass transition temperature
• etching
• lithography
• spectroscopy