Fabrication of the beam splitters for soft X-ray laser application

The soft X-ray interferometry is completed by the Mach-Zehnder interferometer using a soft X-ray laser, and it is also an important method to measure the electron densities of a laser-produced plasma near the critical surface. It is apparently demonstrated in this paper that the incident angle of each optical element in the soft X-ray Mach- Zehnder interferometer should be near normal incidence based on the polarized characteristics of the soft X-ray mul-tilayers, and the product of reflectivity and transmission of the beam splitter should be taken as a standard of design according to the structure of the soft X-ray Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The beam splitters used in the soft X-ray interferometry at 13.9 nm are fabricated using the ion beam sputtering. The figure error of the beam splitter has reached the nanometer magnitude, in which the product of reflectiv-ity and transmission of the beam splitter is more than 1.6%.