We have developed a method for the manufacture of x-ray diffraction gratings with arbitrarily small blaze angles. These gratings are made by a process in which a high blaze angle grating made by anisotropic etching of Si (111) is subjected to planarization and reactive ion etching. Differential etching of the planarization medium and silicon ensures reduction of the blaze angle. Repeated application of this process leads to gratings of increasing perfection with an arbitrarily small blaze angle. This opens the way to highly efficient low line density gratings, to damage resistant gratings for ultra-high power applications such as free electron lasers, and for extension of the use of gratings into the hard x-ray energy range for dispersive spectroscopy.

A process for fabrication of ultra-precise diffraction gratings for high resolution x-ray spectroscopy was developed. A grating pattern with constant or variable line spacing (VLS) is recorded on a quartz plate by use of e-beam lithography with nanometer scale accuracy of the groove placement. The pattern is transferred to a massive grating blank by large area nanoimprint followed by dry or/and wet etching for groove shaping. High fidelity of the nanoimprint transfer step was confirmed by differential wavefront measurements. Successful implementation of the suggested fabrication approach was demonstrated by fabrication of a lamellar 900 lines/mm VLS grating for a soft x-ray fluorescence spectrometer.

We have developed an advanced process for blaze angle reduction of x-ray gratings for the soft, tender, and EUV spectral ranges. The process is based on planarization of an anisotropically etched Si blazed grating followed by a chemically selective plasma etch. This provides a way to adjust the blaze angle to any lower value with high accuracy. Here we demonstrate the reduction of the blaze angle to an extremely low value of 0.04°±0.004°. For a 100 lines/mm grating with a Mo/Si multilayer coating, the grating exhibits diffraction efficiency of 58% in the 1^st diffraction order at a wavelength of 13.3 nm. This technique will be applicable to a wide range of uses of high efficiency gratings for synchrotron sources, as well as for Free Electron Lasers (FEL).

We have designed and fabricated a high groove density blazed grating for a Resonant Inelastic X-ray Scattering spectrometer for the new Qerlin beamline at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) synchrotron facility. The gratings were fabricated using a set of nanofabrication techniques including e-beam lithography, nanoimprint, plasma etch, and anisotropic wet etching. Two gratings with groove density of 6000 lines/mm and 3000 lines/mm and optimized for operation in the 1^st and 2^nd negative diffraction order respectively were fabricated and tested. We report on fabrication details and characterization of the gratings at beamline 6.3.2 of the ALS.

We investigated the growth of Mo/Si multilayers (ML) deposited using a highly collimated flux of ion-beam sputtered particles for a wide range of deposition angles. Growth of the multilayers at normal and moderately inclined deposition is dominated by surface relaxation resulting in smooth interfaces of the multilayer stack. The first signs of interface roughening are observed at a deposition angle of 45° with respect to the normal to the substrate surface. At an oblique angle of 55°, the ML interfaces undergo fast progressive roughening from the substrate to the top of the ML stack, leading to the formation of ripples which are perpendicular to the deposition flux direction. Deposition of the multilayer at an angle of 65° results in a highly periodic lateral ripple structure with a period of 10 nm. The mature ripple pattern forms during growth of only the first few layers and then stabilizes. The ripples propagate through the whole ML stack with almost no changes in frequency and amplitude, resulting in a highly periodic bulk array composed of silicon and molybdenum nano-rods closely packed in a 6-fold symmetric lattice. We present a simple model for the ripple growth, which gives results that are in good agreement with experimental data.