The Arcus Soft X-ray Grating Spectrometer Explorer

Arcus will provide high-resolution soft X-ray spectroscopy in the 12-50 angstrom bandpass with sensitivity orders of magnitude higher than any previous astronomical observatory. The three top science goals for Arcus are to (1) measure the effects of structure formation imprinted upon the hot baryons that are predicted to lie in extended halos around galaxies, groups, and clusters, (2) trace the propagation of outflowing mass, energy, and momentum from the vicinity of the black hole to extragalactic scales as a measure of their feedback and (3) explore how stars form and evolve. Arcus uses 12m focal length grazing-incidence silicon pore X-ray optics (SPO) identical to those developed for the Athena mission, including focal length and radius of curvature. The focused X-rays from these optics are diffracted by high-efficiency Critical-Angle Transmission (CAT) gratings, and the results are imaged with flight-proven CCD detectors and electronics.