Performance of anisotropically-etched gratings in the extreme and far ultraviolet bandpasses

Modern grating manufacturing techniques suffer from inherent issues that limit their peak efficiencies. We describe work in collaboration with the Nanofabrication Lab at Penn State University to design and characterize etched silicon gratings optimized for the extreme (EUV; 10-90 nm) and far ultraviolet (FUV; 90-180 nm) bandpasses. We develop this technology by fabricating a variety of gratings that operate over these bandpasses. We present analyses for two different grating designs in this work. The first is an FUV echelle that has similar parameters to the grating own on the CHESS sounding rocket. CHESS was an FUV spectrograph that utilized a mechanically ruled echelle grating. We compare the efficiency and in-instrument performance of the gratings, finding a ∼ 50% increase in groove efficiency and an 80% decrease in inter-order scatter for the etched gratings compared to their mechanically ruled counterpart. The FUV echelle improvements can ultimately benefit the faint source sensitivity and high-resolution performance of future UV observatories, such as LUVOIR, by reducing the non-uniform inter-order backgrounds that have historically plagued echelle spectrographs. We additionally provide a description of how this lithographic process can be extended to gratings with holographic solutions by discussing our procedure for generating a map of groove traces from holographic recording parameters. This discussion is provided in the context of the creation of a grating sample that was developed in support of the ESCAPE Small Explorer Phase A study.