Advanced Mirrors technologies Group

History
The Advanced Mirrors Technologies Group (AdMiT Group) started its activities in the late 80ies under the guide of Prof. Oberto Citterio for the development of the Nickel Electroforming technology.
This technology has been used to manufacture the X-ray mirrors shells of the optical module aboard the Beppo-SAX satellite.
After further developments, this technology was then applied with great success to the JET-X telescope (whose spare module was adopted for the SWIFT-XRT observatory) and the XMM-Newton X-ray telescope.

Nowadays
The research activities of the AdMiT Group are diversified. The main branches are:

• Nickel Electroforming technology for the next generation of Hard X-ray (10-100 keV) focusing telescopes with multilayers coating, as the SIMBOL-X satellite;
• Thin Glass Shaping technologies, as Hot (secondary adaptive mirrors) and Cold (high throughput lightweight X-ray mirrors) Slumping;
• Ion Beam Figuring technology for high precision shape finishing of optical mirrors and wavefront-correction windows.

Our research consists of the base technology development, spanning from research and study of the materials to be used, up to fine tuning of the step-by-step manufacturing process, the metrology of the mirrors and the simulations of optical designs.
In our labs we have a wide set of instruments that enables to characterize the mirrors in their shape (laser interferometer and profilometer up to 1 meter wide scans) to their surface microroughness (optical profilometer and atomic force microscopes).
In particular, for X-ray mirrors, we can test the reflectivity and scattering of mirrors samples in the soft and hard X-ray spectrum up to 50 keV.
Moreover, we have at our disposal a wide set of software tools for the cross-interpretation of the metrological results with X-ray data, most of them developed here, and updated continuously.

Staff
The AdMiT Group is now guided by Dr. Giovanni Pareschi (PI for the Nickel Electroforming technology)
with the collaboration of Dr. Mauro Ghigo (PI for the Glass and Ion Beam Figuring technologies).
The group is composed by:
staff researcher: Dr. Francesco Mazzoleni;
temporary staff researchers: Dr. Daniele Spiga, Eng. Stefano Basso,
post-doc researchers: Dr. Marta Civitani, and Vincenzo Cotroneo;
PhD students: Rodolfo Canestrari, Elisa Dell’Orto, Laura Proserpio and Giorgia Sironi;
technicians: Sergio Cantù, Marco Frigerio,Donato Garegnani and Renzo Valtolina;
secretary: Rachele Millul;
collaborator: Prof. Oberto Citterio