High-efficiency focusing and imaging by dielectric kinoform zone plate lenses with soft X-rays.

With fast advances in enhancing the focusing/imaging resolution of Fresnel zone plate lenses toward sub-10 nm, low diffraction efficiency in connection with their rectangular zone shape still remains a big issue in both soft and hard X-ray microscopy. In hard X-ray optics, encouraging progress has recently been reported in our earlier attempts of high focusing efficiency by 3D kinoform shaped metallic zone plates, formed by greyscale electron beam lithography. This paper addresses our efforts towards high focusing/imaging efficiency by developing a novel dielectric kinoform zone plate lens for soft X-rays.

Study of structural effects on the polarization characteristics of subwavelength metallic gratings in short infrared wavelengths.

Applications of subwavelength grating based-polarizers for polarimetric detections are being hindered due to the limited extinction ratio. In this work, the structural effect, including the line edge roughness (LER), of the gratings on the polarizing characteristics was studied by both numerical simulations using finite difference and time domain (FDTD) method and experiments, aiming to figure out the optimal grating profile for achieving high transmittance as well as high extinction ratio. Two different configurations of the gratings, one is dual layer Au lines and the other is parabolic shaped Al lines on structured spin-on-carbon (SOC) films were systematically studied and compared.

Trapezoid-kinoform zone plate lens - a solution for efficient focusing in hard X-ray optics.

X-ray microscopes are powerful tools in the nano-inspection of materials owing to their ultra-high resolution at the molecular level. However, the focusing efficiency of binary zone plate lenses as key components in such probes is merely 5% in practice, hindering their application in advanced scientific research. Although kinoform zone plate lenses are in principle supposed to possess high efficiency beyond binary ones, little progress has been reported so far due to the shortage of both a theoretical calculation approach and greyscale lithography for generating fine three-dimensional (3D) kinoform zones of the lenses.