High-efficiency B₄C/Mo₂C alternate multilayer grating for monochromators in the photon energy range from 0.7 to 3.4 keV.

An alternate multilayer (AML) grating has been prepared by coating an ion etched lamellar grating with a B4C/Mo2C multilayer (ML) having a layer thickness close to the groove depth. Such a structure behaves as a 2D synthetic crystal and can reach very high efficiencies when the Bragg condition is satisfied. This AML coated grating has been characterized at the SOLEIL Metrology and Tests Beamline between 0.7 and 1.7 keV and at the four-crystal monochromator beamline of Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) at BESSY II between 1.75 and 3.4 keV. A peak diffraction efficiency of nearly 27% was measured at 2.2 keV. The measured efficiencies are well reproduced by numerical simulations made with the electromagnetic propagation code CARPEM. Such AML gratings, paired with a matched ML mirror, constitute efficient monochromators for intermediate energy photons. They will extend the accessible energy for many applications as x-ray absorption spectroscopy or x-ray magnetic circular dichroism experiments.