Our mirror-based lithographic technique achieves 5 nm half-pitch patterning with EUV light. This breakthrough pushes EUV lithography boundaries beyond the high-NA specifications and serves as a benchmarking platform for novel photoresists.

Several wavefront sensing techniques provide direct or indirect measurements of the wavefront error gradient, for example the Shack–Hartmann sensor, the Foucault knife-edge test, shearing interferometry, and many others. We developed and tested a noniterative method to reconstruct the wavefront error from its gradient. The method is based on the projection of the measured gradients onto a basis derived from multiple directional derivatives that have been combined into an intermediate set of orthogonal functions. To reduce errors that arise from linear approximations, the intermediate functions can be calculated with parameters that match the known experimental conditions. This method can be implemented using any convenient set of smooth polynomials defined on a two-dimensional domain, and it is not computationally intensive. In this paper we describe the method in detail, provide an example of a possible implementation, and discuss the effect that random noise in the measured gradient has on the reconstruction.

GIANO is an infrared (0.9-2.5 μ m cross-dispersed echelle spectrometer designed to achieve high resolution, high throughput, wide band coverage and very high stability for accurate radial velocity measurements. It also includes polarimetric capabilities and a low resolution mode with RS ~ 400 and complete 0.75-2.5 μ m coverage. This makes it a very versatile, common user instrument which will be permanently mounted and available on the Nasmyth-B foci of the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) located at Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory (ORM), La Palma, Spain. The project is fast-track and relies on well known, relatively standard technologies. It has been recognized as one of the top priority instrumental projects of INAF (the Italian National Institute of Astronomy) and received its first financing for the phase-A study in October 2003. Integration in the laboratory is planned to start before the end of 2006, commissioning at the telescope is foreseen within 2007 and scientific operations in 2008. One of the most important scientific goals is the search for rocky planets with habitable conditions around low-mass stars. If completed on time, GIANO will be the first and only IR instrument operating worldwide providing the combination of efficiency, spectral resolution, wavelength coverage and stability necessary for this type of research. With its unique combination of high and low resolution modes, GIANO will also be a very flexible common-user instrument ideal e.g. for quantitative spectroscopy of brown dwarfs, stars and stellar clusters as well as for the determination of the spectral energy distribution of faint/red objects such as high redshift galaxies. The expected limiting magnitudes are such that GIANO will be able to deliver good quality HR spectra of any 2MASS object and LR spectra of any object detected in the UKIDSS large area survey.

The extension of transient grating spectroscopy to the x-ray regime will create numerous opportunities, ranging from the study of thermal transport in the ballistic regime to charge, spin, and energy transfer processes with atomic spatial and femtosecond temporal resolution. Studies involving complicated split-and-delay lines have not yet been successful in achieving this goal. Here we propose a novel, simple method based on the Talbot effect for converging beams, which can easily be implemented at current x-ray free electron lasers. We validate our proposal by analyzing printed interference patterns on polymethyl methacrylate and gold samples using $\sim 3\mathrm{keV}$ X-ray pulses.