Design of transmissive quarter-wave plate in the extreme ultraviolet by aperiodic multilayer

Transmissive quarter-wave plates of an aperiodic multilayer structure and with a high throughput in the extreme ultraviolet region are designed based on numerical techniques. Comparing with conventional quarter-wave plates designed by periodic multilayer structures, aperiodic quarter-wave plates show obvious improvement of transmissive output efficiency under the same parameters such as incident angle and photon energy. Besides, transmissive characteristics of quarter-wave plates designed by aperiodic and periodic multilayer structures have been studied, and the optimized parameters for obtaining the highest output efficiency have also been found.