The absence of efficient light modulators for extreme ultraviolet – EUV and X-ray photons considerably limits their real-life application, particularly when even slight complexity of the beam patterns is required. In the new article, we report on a novel approach to reversible imprinting of a holographic mask in an electronic Wigner crystal material with a sub-90-nm feature size. The structure is imprinted on a sub-picosecond timescale using EUV laser pulses, and acts as a high-efficiency diffraction grating that deflects EUV or soft X-ray light. The imprinted nanostructure is stable after the removal of the exciting beams at low temperatures, but can be easily erased by a single heating beam. Modelling shows that the efficiency of the device can exceed 1%, approaching state-of-the-art etched gratings, but with the benefit of being programmable and tunable over a large range of wavelengths.
You can read the article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-024-01389-z