High efficiency echelle gratings for the far ultraviolet

Modern grating manufacturing techniques suffer from inherent issues that limit their peak efficiencies. The anisotropic etching of silicon facilitates the creation of custom gratings that have sharp and atomically smooth facets, directly addressing these issues. We describe work to fabricate and characterize etched silicon echelles optimized for the far ultraviolet (FUV; 90–180 nm) bandpass. We fabricate two echelles that have parameters similar to the mechanically ruled grating flown on the Colorado High-resolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph sounding rocket. We demonstrate a 42% increase in peak order efficiency and an 83% decrease in interorder scatter using these gratings. We also present analysis on where the remaining efficiency resides. These demonstrated FUV echelle improvements benefit the faint source sensitivity and high resolution performance of future UV observatories.