A High Resolution XUV Grating Monochromator for the Spectral Selection of Ultrashort Harmonic Pulses

A new monochromator with high spectral resolution in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) has been developed for high-order laser harmonics selection. The system has three optical elements-a cylindrical (or spherical) focusing mirror, a uniform-line-spaced plane grating, and a plane mirror. The last element is required to maintain the focus on a fixed vertical slit when the grating subtended angle is changed in order to minimize the spectral defocusing aberration. The parameters of the focusing mirror are determined to introduce a coma that compensates for the coma given by the grating. The possibility of using two interchangeable gratings made the set-up optimized for a broad energy range of 12-50 eV. As a design test case, the set-up has been applied to a selection of the discrete spectral lines emitted by a gas-discharge lamp as the XUV source, obtaining a resolving power E/Delta E > 3000.