Investigation on the properties of a laminar grating as a soft x-ray beam splitter

Laminar-type gratings as soft x-ray beam splitters for interferometry are presented. Gold-coated grating beam splitters with 1000 lines/mm are designed for grazing incidence operation at 13: 9 nm. They are routinely fabricated using electron beam lithography and ion etching techniques. The laminar grating is measured to have almost equal absolute efficiencies of about 20% in the zeroth and -1st orders, which enables a fringe visibility up to 0.99 in the interferometer. The discrepancy of the grating profiles between the optimized theoretical and the experimental results is analyzed according to the comparison of the optimized simulation results and the measurement realization of the grating efficiencies. By a precise control of the grating profile, the grating efficiency in the -1st order and the fringe visibility could be improved to 25% and 1, respectively. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America