Electron Beam Lithography And Nanometer Structures: Fabrication Of Microzone Plates

Microzone plates have been fabricated with the aid of a 100- keV electron beam lithography system. The system has been designed for generating structures with lateral dimensions of less than 100 nm. The particular demands on high resolution, high efficiency imaging Fresnel zone plates and the resultant problems concerning lithography and pattern transfer are discussed. We show a step-by-step improvement of fabricated microzone plates with an outermost zone width of 50 nm. A thin titanium intermediate layer is used as a stable mask to generate ion-milled gold absorber rings with very steep walls. The zone plates have been tested by imaging one another in an x-ray microscope and ave been compared to the image obtained with the holographically fabricated MZP3 microzone plate from Gottingen.