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PARTICULATES GENERATION AND SOLUTIONS FOR THEIR ELIMINATION IN PULSED LASER DEPOSITION

E. György1,* , I. N. Mihailescu1, M. Kompitsas2, A. Giannoudakos2

Affiliation

  1. Lasers Department, Institute of Atomic Physics, P. O. Box MG 54, 077125 Bucharest, Romania
  2. National Hellenic Research Foundation, Theoretical and Physical Chemistry Institute, Vasileos Konstantinou Ave. 48, 11635 Athens, Greece

Abstract

The presence of particulates of various shapes and dimensions on surfaces and incorporated into the bulk stands for the main drawback of pulsed laser deposited structures. The full understanding of the particulates generation mechanisms and development of techniques for their density reduction aiming to the complete elimination are key steps for future technological applications of laser deposited thin films. The choice of proper experimental conditions as the ablating laser wavelength and fluence, the target-collector separation distance, and the ambient gas pressure allows for the significant decrease of the particulates density, but not for the complete elimination. Several techniques have been proposed to reduce the particulates density. Nevertheless, the deposition of completely particulates free thin films was not yet reported. We used in our experiments a two synchronised pulsed laser system for the deposition of thin films and multistructures. The first, UV laser pulse (l=193 nm, tFWHM~10 ns) is applied to ablate the target material and the second IR laser pulse (l= 1.064 mm, tFWHM~10 ns) is directed parallel with the target surface. The role of second IR laser pulse is to heat and vaporise the particulates present in the tail of the ablation plasma generated by the first UV laser pulse. By optimising the time-delay between the two laser pulses we succeeded to deposit structures completely-free of particulates..

Keywords

Pulsed laser irradiation, Thin films deposition, Particulates, Synchronised laser systems.

Submitted at: July 9, 2003
Accepted at: March 15, 2004

Citation

E. György, I. N. Mihailescu, M. Kompitsas, A. Giannoudakos, PARTICULATES GENERATION AND SOLUTIONS FOR THEIR ELIMINATION IN PULSED LASER DEPOSITION, Journal of Optoelectronics and Advanced Materials Vol. 6, Iss. 1, pp. 36-46 (2004)