High-efficiency, broad-bandwidth metal/multilayer-dielectric gratings.

We report on an 800 nm center-wavelength metal/multilayer-dielectric grating (MMDG) with broadband, high diffraction efficiency. The trapezoidal grating ridge consists of an HfO2 layer sandwiched between two SiO2 films. Combining the advantages of SiO2 and HfO2, the grating ridge reduces the difficulties of grating ridge attainment. For such a configuration, high-performance MMDG can be successfully fabricated using the existing technology. Experimentally we demonstrated a 163 nm bandwidth MMDG with -1st-order diffraction efficiency greater than 90%. The fabricated MMDG achieved high performance as the design with large fabrication tolerances.