Spontaneous and artificial direct nanostructuring of solid surface by extreme ultraviolet laser with nanosecond pulses

Nanostructuring can be either spontaneously appearing (such as laser-induced periodic surface structures, and diffraction patterns – for example, in windows of grid proximity-standing at the ablated target-surface) or artificially created (like – as we hoped – interference patterns) that can be in some extend controlled. Due to that a new interferometer (belonging to wave-front division category) with two aspheric mirrors has been developed. Each of these mirrors reflects approximately one half of incoming laser beam and focuses it into a point image. Both focused beams have to intersect each other, and in the intersection region an interference pattern was expected. However, the first tests showed that some other spontaneously appearing interference pattern with substantially larger fringe-pitch is generated. The origin of this idle interference pattern is discussed.