X-ray Optics Design and Fabrication

Metal Assisted Chemical Etching (MacEtch) is an electroless chemical etching technique that has been largely used to create high aspect ratio nanostructures in silicon substrates. The main goal of this project is to use MacEtch for grating fabrication with characteristics that fulfill high energy and large field of view applications.

The grating fabrication team at TOMCAT has developed a mature process flow of grating fabrication, and is now pushing the limits of the fabrication technology with new designs and processing for improved gratings performance. We also bring the most advanced nano- and micro- processing technologies into the lab to overcome obstacles on the road to high quality gratings.

High aspect ratio X-ray optics requires heavy absorbing materials such as gold to provide the required absorption or phase contrast in X-ray imaging. Numerous technologies exist to deposit metal layers/films and examples include sputtering, atomic layer deposition and pulsed laser deposition (not limited to). Electrochemical methods such as electroplating is widely considered as a cost-effective and practical solution for a number of the applications such as microelectronics, MEMS and jewelry. However, the challenge of coating or filling very high aspect ratio in large areas requires non-conventional methods. We developed and currently utilize a number of electrochemical techniques for various metallization steps in the fabrication of X-ray optics.