The High-harmonic generation and EUV science group at ARCNL, Amsterdam, has an opening for a four-year PhD student position to investiage new avenues of high-harmonic generation from solids.

Coherent extreme-ultraviolet pulses from high-harmonic generation have ample applications in attosecond science, lensless imaging, and industrial metrology. However, tailoring complex spatial amplitude, phase, and polarization properties of extreme-ultraviolet pulses is made nontrivial by the lack of efficient optical elements. Here, you will develop novel strategies by nanostructuring solid targets that generate coherent extreme ultraviolet to shape the emission properties at will. Moreover, you will develop new techniques to directly use the coherent diffractive emission from samples in the extreme-ultraviolet to image the samples, with deep-sub-fundamental wavelength resolution, and combine these efforts with femtosecond temporal resolution spectroscopy.

Your experiments will be based on high-harmonic generation from solids. Thus the project will encompass a complex set of disciplines including ultrafast optics, condensed matter physics, nanofabrication of samples, and theoretical modeling with home-written codes that describe strong-field light-matter interaction. A representative publication can be found below.

Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 223902 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.223902

You have (or will receive in near future) an M.Sc. degree in physics, physical chemistry, electrical engineering, or a closely related subject. You enjoy performing experiments and analysis to stepwise build a deeper understanding of complex physical mechanisms. For this position, we are in particular looking for a candidate who is excited about combining strong-field and attosecond solid-state physics with nanofabricated samples. As such, experience in one or more of the involved topics (high-harmonic generation, ultrafast lasers and optics, condensed matter physics, fundamental optical processes in solids, wave optics simulations, simulations of strong-field processes in solids, attosecond and femtosecond science, EUV and X-Ray spectroscopy and scattering, computational imaging, vacuum instrumentation, nanofabraction), in particular experimentally but also theoretically, is advantageous.

Very good verbal and written communications skills (in English) are required.

A PhD researcher position is intended as full-time appointment in the service of NWO for the duration of 4 years (initially 12 months and - after positive evaluation - extended to 4 years). We can assist international candidates with visa applications and ARCNL can assist in finding housing.

Do you come from abroad? We will assist you with visa applications and compensate your transport costs and furnishing expenses. A favorable tax agreement, the ‘30% ruling’, may apply to non-Dutch applicants.

High-Harmonic Generation and EUV Science

The High-harmonic generation and EUV science groups develops and utilizes new high-harmonic generation based extreme ultraviolet and soft-X-ray sources in the energy range from 10 – 600 eV for spectroscopy and metrology applications. Specific areas of interest are attosecond and femtosecond time-resolved spectroscopy of complex chemical and solid-state dynamics, new strategies for efficient high-harmonic generation, as well as new routes for nanometer-scale imaging of semiconductor structures. Novel types of attosecond and femtosecond transient absorption and reflection spectroscopies, as well as scattering techniques, are developed, and applied to fundamental question with particular relevance to nanolithography.

The group is equipped with Ti:Sa (Titanium:Sapphire) lasers for high-harmonic generation. In addition, a unique 50 kHz, multi-mJ optical-parametric chirped-pulse amplifier system ia the main driver for this project.

The groups house state-of-the-art lab facilities at the Advanced Research Center for Nanolithography (ARCNL). The Advanced Research Center for Nanolithography (ARCNL) focuses on the fundamental physics and chemistry involved in current and future key technologies in nanolithography, primarily for the semiconductor industry. ARCNL is a public-private partnership between the Dutch Research Council (NWO), the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the VU University Amsterdam (VU) and the semiconductor equipment manufacturer ASML. ARCNL is located at the Science Park Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and is currently housing about 100 scientists and support staff. We offer a dynamic and open environment, and aim to provide the optimum conditions for young scientists to do exciting research leading to high-impact results, which focus on fundamental physics and chemistry challenges, and might also have direct technological relevance.