Performance of a wideband soft x-ray polarizer

Efficiency and polarization performance of a multilayer-coated laminar grating in the 6.5-6.9-nm wavelength region

We applied a Mo/B4C multilayer coating to a laminar holographic grating with 2400 grooves/mm and a 1-m radius of curvature. By use of synchrotron soft x rays the multilayer-coated grating was evaluated to have diffraction efficiencies of 3.1% and 0.017% for s- and p-polarized radiation, respectively, at a 6.7-nm wavelength at a 45.35 degrees grazing angle of incidence in the +1 (inside) grating order. Thus the polarizance was estimated to be 98.9% at least. The zero-order peak was suppressed by the destructive interference caused by the groove profile.

Thermal stability of sputtered Mo/X and W/X (X = BN:O, B(4)C:O, Si, and C) multilayer soft-x-ray mirrors

We prepared eight samples of Mo/X and W/X (X = BN:O, B(4)C:O, Si, and C) multilayers by magnetron sputtering. Analyses of x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy for the boron nitride and the B(4)C layers showed the concentration of O to be nonnegligible. We have evaluated the thermal stability by measuring soft-x-ray specular reflectances before and after thermal annealing occurs at temperatures as high as 700 °C. The results suggest that the thermal stability depends largely on the inclusion of low-density materials and not on the type of metal. Of the four low-density materials studied, BN:O is thermally the most stable, and the Mo/BN:O multilayer, the most stable among the eight samples, shows stability as high as 700 °C.