Optical Performance of the X-Ray Telescope for the XL-Calibur Experiment

XL-Calibur is a balloon-borne mission for hard X-ray polarimetry. The first launch is currently scheduled from Sweden in summer 2022. Japanese collaborators provide a hard X-ray telescope to the mission. The telescope's design is identical to the Hard X-ray Telescope (HXT, conically-approximated Wolter-I optics) on board ASTRO-H with the same focal length of 12 m and the aperture of 45 cm, which can focus X-rays up to 80 keV. The telescope is divided into three segments in the circumferential direction, and confocal 213 grazing-incidence mirrors are precisely placed in the primary and secondary sections of each segment. The surfaces of the mirrors are coated with Pt/C depth-graded multilayer to reflect hard X-rays efficiently by the Bragg reflection. To achieve the best focus, optical adjustment of all of the segments was performed at the SPring-8/BL20B2 synchrotron radiation facility during 2020. A final performance evaluation was conducted in June 2021 and the experiment yields the effective area of 175 cm(2) and 73 cm(2) at 30 keV and 50 keV, respectively, with its half-power diameter of the point spread function as 2.1 arcmin. The field of view, defined as the full width of the half-maximum of the vignetting curve, is 5.9 arcmin.