The thermal oxide patterning method has been proven effective for compensating coating stress on flat silicon wafers. In this paper we report progress of applying this method on thin X-ray telescope silicon mirrors, produced by GSFC, which are 100 mm long, 0.5 mm thick, 30 degree in azimuthal span and 312 mm in radius of curvature (Wolter-I geometry). The mirrors’ front sides are sputter coated by 20 nm iridium layers which have ~-70 N/m compressive stress. Due to the difference in geometries, we developed a new FEA model to calculate the duty cycle in thermal oxide hexagon patterns to compensate the coating stress. In addition, a new fabrication process with customized photo lithographic tools has been developed to achieve optimum patterning-precision on curved surfaces. Measurement results show that the developed method can mitigate coating-induced distortion by a factor of ~4, corresponding to ~0.5 arc-second in RMS slope error. The residual surface error is dominated by mid-frequency ripples produced by the annealing process, which will be resolved in the future. The developed thermal oxide patterning method could be inexpensive and precise, which could be a candidate to resolve coating stress issues for the Lynx telescope in the future.
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