Soft X-ray multilayer reflectors must be deposited on super-smooth surface such as super-polished silicon wafers or glasses, which are complicate, time-consuming and expensive to produce. To overcome this shortage, C films deposited by RF magnetron sputtering were considered to smooth the K9 glass substrates' surface in the present paper. The structure of C films was systematically studied by XRD and Raman spectrum. The surface morphology and rms-roughness were obtained by AFM. Then, we calculated the impact of the C layers on the reflectivity curve of Mo/Si soft X-ray multilayer reflector around 13.5 nm. The C films exhibit typical amorphous state. With the increasing of power and thickness, the content of sp3 hybrid bonding decreases while the amount or size of well-organized graphite clusters increases. The surface rms-roughness decreases from 2.4 nm to 0.62 nm after smoothed by an 80 nm thick C layer deposited in 500 W, which is the smoothest C layer surface we have obtained. The calculation results show that the theoretical normal incidence reflectivity of Mo/Si multilayer at 13.5 nm increases from 7% to 63%. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.