A comparative investigation of the resistance and ability to trigger high voltage（HV） discharge for a single filament（SF） and multiple filaments（MFs） has been carried out.The experimental results show that the trend of the breakdown threshold of the SF exactly follows that of its resistance,but this is not the case for the MF.The MF＇s resistance is much smaller than the SF＇s.However,the MF shows a slightly higher HV breakdown threshold than the SF.The underlying physics is that the measured resistance of the MF is collectively contributed by every filament in the MF while the HV breakdown threshold is determined by only one single discharging path.
Thermal characteristics of tightly-contacted copper-gold double-layer thin film target under ablation of femtosec- ond laser pulses are investigated by using a two-temperature theoretical model. Numerical simulation shows that electron heat flux varies significantly on the boundary of copper-gold film with different maximal electron temperature of 1.15 x 103 K at 5 ps after ablating laser pulse in gold and copper films, which can reach a balance around 12.6 ps and 8.2 ps for a single and double pulse ablation, respectively, and in the meantime, the lattice temperature difference crossing the gold-copper interface is only about 0.04×103 K at the same time scale. It is also found that electron-lattice heat relaxation time increases linearly with laser fluence in both single and double pulse ablation, and a sudden change of the relaxation time appears after the laser energy density exceeds the ablation threshold.
Aluminum samples have been analyzed by femtosecond polarization-resolved laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy （fs-PRLIBS）. We compare the obtained spectra with those obtained from nanosecond PRLIBS （ns-PRLIBS）. The main specific features of fs-PRLIBS are that a lower plasma temperature leads to a low level of continuum and no species are detected from the ambient gas. Furthermore, signals obtained by fs-PRLIBS show a higher stability than those of ns-PRLIBS. However, more elements are detected in the ns-PRLIBS spectra.
It is shown that the continuum emission produced by an A1 alloy ablated by femtosecond laser pulses is much more polarized than the characteristic lines of elements. A Glan-Thomson polarizer is used in the laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy experiment to investigate the polarization effect. The use of the polarizer at its minimal transmission increases the signal-to-noise ratio. The effects of angle of detection, focal position, and pulse energy on the signal-to- noise ratio are also studied.
Extreme ultraviolet lithography is most promising for the next generation lithography. However, debris from laser-produced plasma, particularly energetic ions, severely decreases the lifetime of extreme ultraviolet optics. We measured the characteris- tics of ions from tin plasma by the time of flight method with a frequency-doubled Nd： YAG laser at the intensity of 3.5x1010 W/cm2 （532 nm, 8 ns）. Our measurement shows that the maximum and peak of tin ions energies from plasma under the above experimental parameters are about 4.2 and 1.8 keV, respectively. Moreover, it is found that kinetic energy angular distribution of tin ions can be fitted by cos0.8（θ）, where θ is the angle with respect to the target normal. We also investigated the mitigation effect of argon, helium gases to the tin ions, and found that tin ions from the plasma can be mitigated effectively at the pressure -38 mTorr for argon or -375 mTorr for helium, respectively.
The polarization-resolved laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy （PRLIBS） technique, which can significantly reduce the polarized emission from laser plasma by placing a polarizer in front of the detector, is a powerful tool to improve the line-to-continuum ratio in LIBS applications. It is shown that the continuum emission from the plasma produced through ablating an Al sample by nanosecond laser pulses is much more polarized than the discrete line emission with the singlepulse PRLIBS technique. The effects of laser fluence and detection angle on the Al polarization spectrum are systematically explored experimentally. The calculated result of the polarization spectrum as a function of laser fluence shows that it is in agreement with the experimental observations.
