Congratulations to Cecilia Fasano, a recipient of the Iowa Space Grant Consortium's Graduate Fellowship award! The award comes with $4,000 of financial support, and facilitates her work in making and characterizing high performance echelle gratings for UV astronomy.

Gratings are an essential optical element for measuring the spectrum of UV / soft X-ray astronomical sources, such as the coronae of stars, supermassive black holes, the hot halos surrounding galaxies, etc. High performance gratings enable us to observe fainter astronomical objects in more detail, as well as better separate features closely spaced in energy.

Cecilia makes such gratings using lithography and etch tools from the semiconductor industry. Her grating patterns are made using electron-beam lithography (EBL), which writes a controlled pattern in resist using a beam of high energy electrons. A series of other etching and coating steps, including a reactive ion etch, a KOH wet etch, and electron-beam sputter coating, ready them for characterization and X-ray test. Cecilia performs each of these processing steps herself in the U. Iowa MATFab facility.

The manufacture and characterization of these astronomical gratings directly relates to the work of the Astrophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD), answering the high priority call for “High efficiency X-ray Grating Arrays for High-Resolution Spectroscopy.”

Details about the ISGC's funding opportunities for undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty can be found at their website, while a link to the departmental announcement is included here.