EFFICIENT HIGH HARMONIC GENERATION SOURCES FOR APPLICATIONS IN X-RAY IMAGING

High Harmonic Generation (HHG) has moved from being an experiment in itself to acting as a light source for new experimental techniques. In the time domain this is well documented, but HHG sources for applications which make use of the spatial coherence of the HHG as well as its other properties are much less well developed. The work in this thesis aims to develop efficient and spatially coherent sources of XUV and soft X-ray radiation for use in experiments such as coherent imaging, which rely heavily on the coherence properties of the HHG. the efficiency of generation will be explored via study of wavelength dependence and phase matching, with the emphasis on concurrent high spatial coherence. The development of high-resolution X-ray microscopy of a range of samples, which requires both high flux and high coherence, will be used as a test case to refine the HHG source properties.