Major new developments in XUV and x-ray optics, with applications in a wide variety of scientific fields ranging from x-ray astronomy to laboratory plasma diagnostics and synchrotron radiation instrumentation are due to the improvement in techniques for producing stable multilayers of sufficient quality. The specific goal is to understand the basic physics of the instrumentation being built. The construction of multilayer normal incidence optics depends on a proper understanding of the x-ray optical properties of materials on very small spatial scales. This problem is one of the central issues demonstrated by the large differences between actual and theoretical performance. Three distinct issues will be addressed: (i) continued development of techniques for the fabrication of multilayer coatings, with the specific aim of optimizing the procedures and materials for the production of high quality normal-incidence optics at soft x-ray and XUV wavelengths. (ii) measurement and evaluation of multilayer coating performance, with emphasis on achieving near-theoretical results on figured substrates; this includes determination of material combinations and substrate fabrication procedures which provide optimum performance; and (iii) development of techniques for producing extremely fine grain x-ray phosphor converting screens, as part of a program to produce a large area, high resolution soft x-ray detector for measuring multilayer mirror performance. Such detectors are required because of the ability of normal incidence optics to image large fields of view with high spatial resolution.
