Recent Developments in Laue Lens Manufacturing and Their Impact on Imaging Performance

We report on recent progress in the development of Laue lenses forapplications in hard X/soft gamma-ray astronomy. Here we focus on therealization of a sector of such a lens made of 11 bent Germanium crystals anddescribe the technological challenges involved in their positioning andalignment with adhesive-based bonding techniques. The accurate alignment andthe uniformity of the curvature of the crystals are critical for achievingoptimal X-ray focusing capabilities. We have assessed how the errors ofmisalignment with respect to the main orientation angles of the crystals affectthe point spread function (PSF) of the image diffracted by a single sector. Wehave corroborated these results with simulations carried out with our physicalmodel of the lens, based on a Monte Carlo ray-tracing technique, adopting thegeometrical configuration of the Laue sector, the observed assembly accuracyand the measured curvatures of the crystals. An extrapolation of theperformances achieved on a single sector to an entire Laue lens based on thismodel has shown that a PSF with half-power-diameter of 4.8 arcmin can beachieved with current technology. This has the potential to lead to asignificant improvement in sensitivity of spectroscopic and polarimetricobservations in the 50-600 keV band