What seems like a lightweight sabre is definitely a laser beam guided in its path via a hair-thin jet of water, in the identical method as typical fibre optics.
This water jet offers a big ‘processing depth’, permitting parallel slicing of bigger samples. Its water additionally serves to repeatedly cool the slicing zone and effectively take away reduce materials.
This Laser Microjet machine from Synova SA in Switzerland is being employed by cosine within the Netherlands to slice novel X-ray optics for ESA’s NewAthena area observatory to survey the new, energetic Universe.
Energetic X-rays don’t behave like typical gentle waves: they don’t mirror in a typical mirror. As a substitute they’ll solely be mirrored at shallow angles, like stones skimming alongside water. So a number of mirrors should be stacked collectively to focus them. NewAthena will subsequently make use of ‘silicon pore optics’, based mostly on the precisely-aligned stacking collectively of tens of hundreds of mirror plates constructed from industrial silicon wafers, that are usually used to fabricate silicon chips.
This expertise – developed by ESA, cosine and different companions – will allow the constructing of a 2.6 m diameter X-ray lens for NewAthena’s telescope. Manufacturing of those mirror modules has reached the demonstration stage and their mass manufacturing is now being ready, to prepared NewAthena for launch in 2037 as one in all ESA’s main ‘Giant class’ missions.
