Infrared antireflective filtering for extreme ultraviolet multilayer Bragg reflectors

An extreme ultraviolet multilayer mirror with an integrated spectral filter for the IR range is presented and experimentally evaluated. The system consists of an IR-transparent B4C/Si multilayer stack which is used both as EUV-reflective coating and as a phase shift layer of the resonant IR antireflective (AR) coating. The AR coating is optimized in our particular case to suppress CO2 laser radiation at a wavelength of 10.6 mu m, and a suppression of more than two orders of magnitude is demonstrated. The method allows high suppression over a large angular acceptance range, relevant for application in lithography systems. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America