Missions, reviews and current work ·
Wide-field X-ray telescope
Grazing-incidence optics optimised for imaging across a wide field.
- With
- Robert Burg and Riccardo Giacconi
- Key paper
- Burrows, Burg & Giacconi 1992, ApJ 392, 760
Working with Riccardo Giacconi and Robert Burg, Chris showed how to design grazing-incidence X-ray mirrors that trade a little on-axis resolution for much better image quality across a wide field. Classical Wolter optics are optimised for the centre of the field. The optimised designs are suited to surveys of large-scale structure, such as clusters of galaxies.
Adding higher-order polynomial terms to the Wolter I prescription is now the standard starting point for wide-field X-ray survey optics. It underpins the Wide Field X-ray Telescope (WFXT) mission studies led from Brera and the US, including full multi-shell polynomial module designs (Conconi et al. 2010). The eROSITA telescope on Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma, launched in 2019, cites this work for the case for wide-field X-ray telescopes. It reaches a similar field-averaged trade with Wolter I shells and a slight intrafocal shift of the cameras.
ADS records 51 papers citing the 1992 paper. Beyond X-ray survey optics, they include the Italian ASTRI Cherenkov telescopes (aplanatic Schwarzschild–Couder designs on Mount Etna), mission studies for Athena, Lynx, STAR-X and the CubeX lunar SmallSat, a Wolter imager for Sandia's Z machine, and a cold-neutron microscope built with axisymmetric focusing mirrors.
Papers
- 1992
- 1990The study of large-scale structures with wide-field X-ray opticsBurg, R.; Burrows, C. J.; Giacconi, R.AIP Conference Proceedings
- 2010
- 2021