Public Funding for Maple Fleet Services Limited

This project aims to build upon the work carried out over the last 18months at Crystal Scientific. We already have a pre-production prototype 1.2m flat X-ray mirror enhanced by differential coating. The fabrication of this mirror has involved using the latest metrology equipment at the Diamond Light Source, Oxford, and the collaboration of metrology scientists at this institution. This new method for enhancing the performance of x-ray mirrors has huge promise and the data from our 1.2m flat mirror is to be presented at a scientific meeting and published in its corresponding journal. The aim of this development project is to prove the consistency and reliability of the differential coating technique and to fully incorporate this technique into our production process. We aim to manufacture a series of flat x-ray mirrors of different sizes ranging from 400mm to 1.5m in length. We will apply differential coatings to these mirrors to test the reliability and reproducibility of this technique. This work will culminate in the production of a number of demonstration prototype mirrors to be sent to metrology laboratories world-wide for evaluation. We also aim to extend the differential coating technique to the manufacture of elliptical mirrors. The significant innovation and technical advance of this project will be to develop state of the art mirrors with minimal residual slope errors which can compete directly with the established (bi-morph) mirror technology and be of direct benefit to the scientific community.