Lamellar multilayer gratings with very high diffraction efficiency

We report here the development of a hard x-ray multilayer grating that has achieved an absolute efficiency of 34% at a wavelength of 1.54A. The W-C multilayer itself has a reflectivity of 57% and the grating has a 0th order absolute efficiency of 36%. The origin of this extraordinarily high efficiency is that the short period and highly asymmetric structure of the grating combined with its deep grooves allows light to interact with a large number of layer pairs. This increases angular separation of the diffraction orders and reduces the multilayer bandwidth to the point where there is little or no order to order overlap in the grating structure, and hence maximum intensity can be diffracted into a selected order. This paper reports on the development of an optimized multilayer grating and some of its unique characteristics.