State of the art soft x-ray spectroscopy techniques like Resonant Inelastic X-ray Scattering (RIXS) require diffraction gratings which can provide extremely high spectral resolution of 105-106. This problem may be addressed with a sliced multilayer grating with an ultra-high groove density (up to 50,000 mm-1) proposed in the recent publication (Voronov, D. L., Cambie, R., Feshchenko, R. M., Gullikson, E., Padmore, H. A., Vinogradov, A. V., Yashchuk, V. V., Proc. SPIE 6705, 67050E (2007)). It has been suggested to fabricate such a grating by deposition of a soft x-ray multilayer on a substrate which is a blazed saw-tooth grating (echellette) with low groove density. Subsequent polishing applied to the coated grating removes part of the coating and forms an oblique-cut multiline structure that is a sliced multilayer grating. The resulting grating has a short-scale periodicity of lines (bilayers), which is defined by the multilayer period and the oblique-cut angle. We fabricated and tested a Sc/Si multilayer sliced grating suitable for EUV applications, which is a first prototype based on the suggested technique. In order to fabricate an echellette substrate, we used anisotropic KOH etching of a Si wafer. The etching regime was optimized to obtain smooth and flat echellette facets. A Sc/Si multilayer was deposited by dc-magnetron sputtering, and after that it was mechanically polished using a number of diamond pastes. The resulting sliced grating prototype with approx. 270 nm line period has demonstrated a dispersive ability in the 41-49 nm photon wavelength range with a diffraction efficiency of approx. 7 percent for the optimized 38th order assigned to the echellette grating of 10 mu m period.
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