Design of an extreme ultraviolet spectrometer suite to characterize rapidly heated solid matter.

An ultrafast streaked extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) spectrometer (5-20 nm) was developed to measure the temperature dynamics in rapidly heated samples. Rapid heating makes it possible to create exotic states of matter that can be probed during their inertial confinement time-tens of picoseconds in the case of micron-sized targets. In contrast to other forms of pyrometry, where the temperature is inferred from bulk x-ray emission, XUV emission is restricted to the sample surface, allowing for a temperature measurement at the material-vacuum interface. The surface-temperature measurement constrains models for the release of high-energy-density material. Coupling the XUV spectrometer to an ultrafast (<2-ps) streak camera provided picosecond-time scale evolution of the surface-layer emission. Two high-throughput XUV spectrometers were designed to simultaneously measure the time-resolved and absolute XUV emission.