Low-energy ion-assisted magnetron sputter deposition has been used for the synthesis of highly reflective Ni/V multilayer soft X-ray mirrors. A low ion energy and a high ion-to-metal flux ratio were employed in order to stimulate the adatom mobility while minimizing ion-induced intermixing at the interfaces. An analytic model, based on the binary collision approximation, was used in order to gain insight into low-energy ion-surface interactions as a function of ion energy and ion-to-metal flux ratio. The model predicted a favorable region in the ion energy-flux parameter space where only surface atomic displacements are stimulated during growth of Ni and V for multilayers. For a series of Ni/V multilayer mirrors with multilayer periods about boolean AND = 1.2 nm, grown with a continuous ion assistance using energies in the range 7-36 eV and with ion-to-metal flux ratios Phi(N1) = 4.7 and Phi(V) = 20.9, specular and diffuse X-ray scattering analyses revealed that ion energies of similar to 27-31 eV produced the best trade-off between reduced interfacial roughness and intermixing. However, it was also concluded that an interface mixing of about +/- 1 atomic distance is unavoidable when a continuous flux of assisting ions is used. To overcome this limitation, a sophisticated interface engineering technique was employed, where the first 0.3 nm of each layer was grown with a high-flux low-energy ion assistance and the remaining part was grown with a slightly higher ion energy. This method was demonstrated to largely eliminate the intermixing while maintaining the smoothening effect of ion assistance. Two Ni/V multilayer soft X-ray mirror structures, one with 500 periods designed for near-normal incidence and one 150 periods reflecting polarizer at the Brewster angle, were grown utilizing the interface engineering concept. Both the near-normal incidence reflectivity as well as polarizability were improved by a factor of 2 as compared to previously reported data for an X-ray energy of E = 511 eV (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.