Recent advances in the alignment of silicon mirrors for high-resolution x-ray optics

Recent advances in the fabrication of segmented silicon mirrorsmake it possible to build large-area, lightweight, high-resolution x-ray telescopeswith arc-second angular resolution. To build such a telescope, we fabricate accurate silicon mirrorsand develop alignment and bonding techniques to precisely align and integrate these silicon mirrorsegments into modular units. In this way, the processes of mirrorfabrication, mirroralignment and bonding, and subsequent integration into units of successive larger scale are completely independent, and their technologies can be developed independently. In this paper, we present recent improvement in the precision of optical alignment and mirrorbonding. We discuss the measurement of the mirror’s focusing in a parallel optical beam and address the practical challenges in bonding these mirrorsinto modules as an intermediate step to build up a full-scale telescopefor space missions.