Publications
Measurement of the efficiency of gold transmission gratings in the 100 to 5000 eV photon energy range
Three x-ray spectrometers, each with a transmission grating dispersion element, are routinely used at the Z soft x-ray facility to measure the spectrum and temporal history of the absolute soft x-ray power emitted from z-pinch and hohlraum radiation sources. Our goal is to make these measurements within an accuracy of ±10%. We periodically characterize the efficiency of the gratings used in the spectrometers by using an electron-impact soft x-ray source, a monochromator, grazing-incidence mirrors, thin filters, and an x-ray charge-coupled device (CCD) detector. We measure the transmission efficiency of the gratings at many photon energies for several grating orders. For each grating, we calculate efficiency as a function of photon energy using published optical constants of gold and multiple-slit Fraunhofer diffraction theory and fit the calculation to the measurements using the physical parameters of the grating as variables. This article describes the measurement apparatus and calibration techniques, discusses the grating efficiency calculation and fitting procedure, and presents recent results. © 2001 American Institute of Physics.