A novel single-order diffraction grating: Random position rectangle grating**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11375160) and the National Science Instruments Major Project of China (Grant No. 2012YQ130125).

Abstract

Spectral diagnosis of radiation from laser plasma interaction and monochromation of radiation source are hot and important topics recently. Grating is one of the primary optical elements to do this job. Although easy to fabricate, traditional diffraction grating suffers from multi-order diffraction contamination. On the other hand, sinusoidal amplitude grating has the nonharmonic diffraction property, but it is too difficult to fabricate, especially for x-ray application. A novel nonharmonic diffraction grating named random position rectangle grating (RPRG) is proposed in this paper. Theoretical analysis and experiment results show that the RPRG is both higher order diffraction suppressing and not difficult to fabricate. Additionally, it is highly efficient; its first order absolute theoretical diffraction efficiency reaches 4.1%. Our result shows that RPRG is a novel tool for radiation diagnosis and monochromation.