Grazing Incidence Reflection and Scattering of MeV Protons

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.