Researchers create the first transmissive optics technology within the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) realm to provide clean foci and images—enabling exploration of attosecond physics at play during fundamental physical processes.
A team of researchers from Harvard University (Cambridge, MA) and Graz University of Technology (Austria) recently created the first metalens to focus beams of extreme ultraviolet (EUV). This feat opens the door to exploring microelectronics and fundamental physical processes at an attosecond level.
Marcus Ossiander, a postdoctoral fellow in Federico Capasso’s group at Harvard and now working at Graz University of Technology, has a Ph.D. in attosecond physics, which requires EUV to create the shortest light pulses to observe the evolution of physical processes such as the photoelectric effect. He and colleagues struggled with a severe lack of optics for attosecond physics, because it disrupted projects or made them downright impossible.
“After I learned how to design metalenses, I had this dream a metalens might solve our problems in attosecond physics—and, it turns out, it can,” says Ossiander, who is now switching back to attosecond physics to harness these new tools.
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