Compensating film stress in thin silicon substrates using ion implantation

Future space telescopes, especially X-ray telescopes, will require thin mirrors to achieve high optical throughput. Thin mirrors are more difficult to fabricate than thick mirrors, but recent advances have made accurate fabrication of thin mirrors possible. However, mirrors must have a reflective coating, which typically has non-repeatable and nonuniform intrinsic stress that deforms a thin mirror. Reducing coating stress by controlling deposition parameters typically reduces reflectivity. Non-uniform integrated stress compensation (NISC) methods, in which spatially controlled stress is applied to the mirror substrate backside to balance the frontside coating stress, decouple the film stress from the reflectivity. Ion implantation is one NISC method, where high-energy ions are implanted into a glass or silicon substrate to generate stress near the substrate surface. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of ion implantation for stress compensation of 30 nm thick chromium films applied to the front of five silicon wafers. The reflective films have mean integrated stress between −8 and −35 N/m, which cause deformations between 400 and 1600 nm RMS. We demonstrate that these wafers can be restored to the pre-coating shape to within 60 nm RMS, in most cases within 1/20th of the coating deformation.