Fabrication of Fresnel zone plates by holography in the extreme ultraviolet region

Fabrication of Fresnel zone plates (FZPs) with nanometer scale resolution is one of the major challenges in lithographic fabrication. The authors present a holographic approach to create FZPs where the interference pattern between a spherical beam and a plane wave is recorded to obtain the FZP structure. The spherical beam is obtained by diffraction from a circular aperture (pinhole) in a semiopaque membrane which is illuminated by a spatially coherent extreme ultraviolet beam. The beam transmitted by the membrane serves as the reference plane wave. The resulting pattern gives rise to a FZP with outermost zone width comparable to the dimension of the circular aperture. Fabrication and test results of a FZP obtained with this method are presented. The technique offers a solution to the pattern-placement problem encountered in serial ZP writing techniques as well as high resolution potential.