Towards circularly polarized (sub-) femtosecond XUV pulses for ultrafast pump-probe experiments

Circularly polarized (CP) XUV radiation has been demonstrated to be a useful probe for the experimental investigation of electronic effects in magnetic materials such as magnetic circular dichroism, spin-polarized photoemission, magneto-optical Kerr-effect and others. On the laboratory scale, High Harmonic (HH) gas jet sources which inherently provide coherent and ultrashort linearly polarized XUV pulses in the sub-fs domain, suitable to study ultrafast dynamics, have emerged. In our setup we aim at incorporating in-house fabricated broadband transmission multilayer phase shifters into a laser driven 10kHz repetition rate HH Source in the 50-70eV photon energy range. To our knowledge only little investigation on such polarizers intended for use in HH radiation has been made so far. We examine our phase shifters regarding tunability of energy range, phase retardation, transmission efficiency and spectral bandwidth. For this purpose we use a home-made XUV flat-field spectrometer and a multilayer mirror based polarization analyzer. Combining the expected CP pulses with our TOF-PEEM and ARPES spectrometer will pave the way towards time resolved measurements of exchange-coupled electron dynamics.