Extreme-Ultraviolet Shaping and Imaging by High-Harmonic Generation from Nanostructured Silica

Funding Information: Part of this work has been carried out at the Advanced Research Center for Nanolithography (ARCNL), a public-private partnership of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), the Dutch Research Council (NWO), and the semiconductor equipment manufacturer ASML, and was partly financed by Toeslag voor Topconsortia voor Kennis en Innovatie (TKI) from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy. We thank Reinout Jaarsma for technical support, and the mechanical workshop and the design, electronic, and software departments of ARCNL for support in constructing the setup. P. M. K. acknowledges support from NWO Veni Grant 016.Veni.192.254. Numerical simulations were performed at the research institute AMOLF, as part of the research programs Hybrid Nanophotonic Architectures for Ultrafast Quantum Optics (Project No. 680.47.621) and Nanophotonics for Solid-State Lighting (Project FOM-i33/680.93.33), both partly financed by NWO. Parts of the simulations were performed within the Aalto University School of Science Science-IT project, and were funded by the Academy of Finland Flagship Programme, Photonics Research and Innovation (PREIN), decision number: 320167. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.Coherent extreme-ultraviolet pulses from high-harmonic generation have ample applications in attosecond science, lensless imaging, and industrial metrology. However, tailoring complex spatial amplitude, phase, and polarization properties of extreme-ultraviolet pulses is made nontrivial by the lack of efficient optical elements. Here, we have overcome this limitation through nanoengineered solid samples, which enable direct control over amplitude and phase patterns of nonlinearly generated extreme-ultraviolet pulses. We demonstrate experimental configurations and emitting structures that yield spatially patterned beam profiles, increased conversion efficiencies, and tailored polarization states. Furthermore, we use the emitted patterns to reconstruct height profiles, probe the near-field confinement in nanostructures below the diffraction limit of the fundamental radiation, and to image complex structures through coherent diffractive emission from these structures. Our results pave the way for introducing sub-fundamental-wavelength resolution imaging, direct manipulation of beams through nanoengineered samples, and metrology of nanostructures into the extreme-ultraviolet spectral range.Peer reviewe