Reflective X-ray Optics

The development in recent years of nanometer-scale multilayer thin-film coating technology designed to reflect short-wavelength radiation -- X-ray and  extreme-UV light -- has made it possible for the first time to efficiently focus and filter this radiation for a variety of scientific and technological applications.  

Reflective X-ray Optics LLC (RXO) produces X-ray optics utilizing such multilayer coatings, specializing in custom applications that require uncompromising performance using state-of-the-art technology. 

Building upon the research achievements of company founder and president, Dr. David L. Windt, RXO has ongoing, federally-funded research programs to develop new high-performance multilayer X-ray optics for operation in the extreme ultraviolet, soft X-ray and hard X-ray regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.  

Multilayer coatings currently can be produced for operation from about 14 eV (90 nm) in the EUV to 200 keV in the hard X-ray:


A selection of some currently available normal incidence EUV and soft X-ray multilayers.



Depth-graded multilayers, such as these W/SiC coatings, provide broad-band reflectance at grazing incidence in the hard X-ray band.


With a variety of custom, in-house coating, metrology and at-wavelength calibration facilities to accommodate large-diameter (>30 cm) mirror substrates, implementing strict contamination control protocols and coating thickness uniformity control to a fraction of a percent, RXO provides flight-quality X-ray multilayer coatings for NASA-sponsored space science missions, and for other precision applications as well.


A normal incidence EUV telescope mirror, coated with Mo/Y (9.4 nm) and SiC/Mg (30.4 nm) multilayers, produced for the AIA instrument developed by Lockheed-Martin (A. Title) and Harvard-Smithsonian (L. Golub) for NASA's SDO mission.



Normal incidence mirrors coated with Mo/Si multilayers for EUV lithography.



Thermally-formed glass shells coated with depth-graded W/Si multilayers for operation at grazing incidence in the hard X-ray, in support of NASA's HEFT balloon instrument developed at the California Institute of Technology (F. Harrison).

Please contact RXO if you need high-performance X-ray multilayer optics for your application.