Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2012
Laser plasma experiments, which demonstrated the single order diffraction property of spectroscopic photon sieve (a novel single-order diffraction grating), were performed on the SILEX-I femto-second laser facility. High-intensity laser radiation was focused onto a Cu target to generate plasma. The spectra of soft X-ray from copper plasmas have been measured with spectroscopic photon sieve based spectrograph. The results show that the spectroscopic photon sieve is able to provide soft X-ray spectrum free from higher-order diffraction components. The measured spectra obtained with such a spectroscopic photon sieve need no unfolding process to extract higher-order diffraction interference.