INTRODUCTIONAnalyzing the quality of large concave surfaces remains a very difficult problem. In this study a new approach to this problem is proposed which is based on the whispering gallery effect in the X ray wave length range. The essence of this effect is as follows: an acoustic or electromagnetic wave which is tangentially incident on a concave surface slides along it due to successive reflections. The results of theoretical stud ies of the whispering gallery effect in the X ray wave length range can be found in [1][2][3][4]. The experimental data on this phenomenon were reported in [5][6][7][8][9][10][11].The idea of using the whispering gallery effect for studying the roughness of concave surfaces was pro posed in [12][13][14], where the influence of surface parameters on the angular distribution of intensity in the emerging beam was demonstrated. These parame ters include the rms roughness height and the form of the roughness correlation function. However, only concave cylindrical surfaces were considered in [12][13][14] for simplicity. It was shown in [15] that, from the experimental point of view, it is even simpler to observe the whispering gallery effect on concave spherical sur faces. In this case an important requirement is the presence of a source with a wide angular spectrum. In addition, the propagation of an X ray beam sliding along a concave spherical surface (depending on the mutual position of the source and the surface) was analyzed in detail in [15].The possibility of detecting defects on concave spherical surfaces with the aid of the whispering gal lery effect in the X ray wavelength range is shown in this study. An important feature of the proposed approach is the possibility of determining the position and size of treatment defects on the surface analyzed. Furthermore, the method under consideration is qual itatively described and the results of the first experi ments, in which the concave spherical mirror was investigated, are analyzed.
QUALITATIVE ANALYSISThe essence of the proposed approach is the obser vation of the whispering gallery effect on a spherical mirror at different angles of rotation of the mirror around its symmetry axis. As was shown in [15], a beam multiple times reflected from a concave spheri cal surface has a transverse cross section in the form of a spot strongly elongated in one direction (Fig. 1a). The characteristic dependence of the intensity in the spot along this direction (which will be referred to as a cross section below) is shown in Fig. 1b. It can be seen that there are some features on the mirror surface along the beam propagation path (that are likely caused by the treatment defects) which lead to local partial reduction of the beam intensity. Obviously, their displacement to another area of the spherical sur face would shift the local minimum in the measured intensity distribution.These preliminary results suggest that the location and sizes of treatment defects on a concave spherical surface can be determined by exposing the surface to a sliding X ra...