Fabrication of x-ray zone plates by surface-plasma chemical vapor deposition

A new cost-efficient sputter-slice technology for hard x-ray (10-30 keV) Fresnel zone plates fabrication, imposing no limitation to aspect ratio, is proposed. By means of a plasma chemical process, SiO(2)/Si(1-x)Ge(x)O(2) glassy film multilayer structures are deposited on a lateral surface of a silica rod, outermost layers being as thin as 100 nm. It has been shown by numerical simulation that for x=0.2 germanium fraction, 100-300 microm zone plate thickness and the number of zones of about 1000, first order diffraction efficiency as high as 20%-30% at the energy of approximately 20 keV can be achieved.