The Mo/Si multilayer mirror has been widely used in EUV astronomy, lithography, microscopy and other fields because of its high reflectivity at the wavelength around 13.5 nm. During the fabrication of Mo/Si multilayers on large, curved mirrors, shadow mask was a common method to precisely control the period thickness distribution. To investigate the effect of shadow mask on the microstructure of Mo/Si multilayers, we deposited a set of Mo/Si multilayers with and without the shadow mask on a curved substrate with aperture of 200 mm by direct current (DC) magnetron sputtering in this work. Grazing incidence X-ray reflectivity (GIXR), diffuse scattering, atomic force microscope (AFM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) were used to characterize the multilayer structure and the EUV reflectivity were measured at the National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) in China. By comparing the results, we found that the layer microstructure including interface width, surface roughness, layer crystallization and the reflectivity were barely affected by the mask and a high accuracy of the layer thickness gradient can be achieved.
