Dynamic Imaging of Periodic Structures using Extreme Ultraviolet Scatterometry

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel EUV scatterometry technique for real-time imaging of dynamic processes in periodic nanostructures, enabling faster analysis of nanoscale phonon and charge dynamics without full diffraction imaging.

Contribution

It presents a new method to extract 1D images of periodic structures from EUV scatterometry data by analyzing diffracted intensities, bypassing complex phase retrieval.

Findings

Method accurately reconstructs nanoscale dynamics from EUV data.

Simulations confirm robustness beyond scalar diffraction assumptions.

Experimental demonstration visualizes phonon relaxation in nanowires.

Abstract

Dynamic scattering and imaging with coherent, ultrafast, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light sources can resolve charge, phonon and spin processes on their intrinsic length and time scales. However, full field coherent diffraction imaging requires scanning of the sample combined with computational phase retrieval, making it challenging to quickly acquire a large series of dynamic frames. In this work, we demonstrate a technique for extracting dynamic 1D images of the average unit cell in a periodic sample from traditional EUV scatterometry data by analyzing the changing intensities of the far field diffracted orders. Starting from a system of equations relating small changes in far field diffraction to phase and amplitude perturbations at the sample plane, it is shown that under certain conditions, changes to the $n$th diffracted order map exclusively onto the $n$th Fourier component of the perturbation via a closed-form relation. We show through rigorous coupled-wave analysis simulations that our method can provide a good approximation even outside the scalar diffraction theory framework in which it is derived. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate this reconstruction method by exiting 1D nickel nanowires on a diamond substrate using an infrared laser pump pulse, and measuring their relaxation using a time-delayed EUV probe pulse, to visualize nanoscale phonon dynamics.