• About
• Team

The SNL has a long history of fabricating gratings for space missions in the areas of x-ray astronomy, the earth’s magnetosphere, and solar physics.  Our current main focus is Critical-Angle Transmission (CAT) grating technology for high-resolution soft x-ray spectroscopy, combining the advantages of traditional transmission gratings and blazed reflection gratings.  This technology promises orders of magnitude figure of merit improvements relative to current missions and is aimed at the Arcus and Lynx mission concepts and soft x-ray spectropolarimetry.  We use state-of-the-art lithography and nanotechnology tools and methods for grating fabrication, precision engineering for the alignment and integration of grating arrays, and specialized x-ray facilities for the characterization of CAT gratings.  See here for more details.