Soft x-ray high diffraction efficiency and spectral flux laminar-type W/B4C multilayer diffraction grating for...

Multilayer diffraction gratings are designed to improve the detection limit and sensitivity of soft x-ray flat-field spectrographs in the region of 300-1000 eV, placing emphasis on Fe-L (705 eV), Cu-L (930 eV), and Zn-L (1012 eV) emissions. For this purpose, spectral flux was used as the performance index, which is proportional to the amount of optical flux incident into a detector and correlated with detection sensitivity. A super-mirror-type W/B4C multilayer coating [Koike et al., Rev.Sci. Instrum. 94, 045109 (2023)] was employed to improve diffraction efficiency in a wide energy region. The unique feature of the multilayer structure is that the average refractive index and the period length of W/B4C layer pairs are increased from the bottom to top layers. In addition, the incidence angle was reduced to 86.03° from 88.65° and the nominal groove density was increased to 3200 lines/mm from 2400 lines/mm of our previous design, to improve spectral flux while maintaining dispersion and spectral resolution. A holographic varied-line-spacing spherical grating and a soft x-ray flat-field spectrograph were designed, using the aspherical-wavefront-recording method, assuming the nominal grating constant and incident angle described above. The numerical simulation results showed that the spectrograph employing the newly designed grating with the W/B4C multilayer indicated 3.2-8.2 times higher spectral flux compared with those using the previously designed grating while keeping the same spectral resolution.