Grazing Incidence Reflection and Scattering of MeV Protons

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that MeV protons can undergo total external reflection similar to X-rays, explaining observed degradation in space telescopes and exploring potential for proton optics.

Contribution

It introduces a wave-based approach to proton reflection and scattering, extending the index of refraction concept to MeV protons.

Findings

Protons exhibit total external reflection up to a few MeV.

Surface scattering explains angular distributions of scattered protons.

Calculated reflection efficiencies match observed CCD degradation in space telescopes.

Abstract

Treating protons as de Broglie waves shows that up to a few MeV energies protons experience total external reflection using the index of refraction concept for the target earlier applied to electrons. Angular scattering distributions can be explained by random surface scattering as known for X-rays. Applied to the {\it{Chandra}} and {\it{XMM-Newton}} X-ray telescopes the calculated reflection efficiencies can explain the observed degradation of the X-ray CCDs for both missions. Some discussion about the possibility of realizing imaging sub-MeV and MeV proton optics is presented.