Super-hard functional coatings are obtained by high power excimer laser based PLD. Diamond-like, tetrahedral amorphous carbon (ta-C) is grown on substrates moderately heated to below 90°C inside a vacuum chamber upon ablating a graphite target by means of a high pulse energy excimer laser at a wavelength of 248 nm. The fast evaporation of the target material induced by the high photon energy of 5 eV, the short temporal width of 30 ns and the high fluence of the excimer laser pulses generates plume species with a high degree of ionisation and high kinetic energies. As a consequence, the kinetic energies resulting from excimer based PLD are significantly higher than those associated with the thermal evaporation and the ion sputtering deposition methods. In fact, the mean kinetic energy of the atoms and ions in the plume are in the range of 30 eV to 80 eV for fluencies of 5 J/cm² to 20 J/cm². Such large ontarget UV fluences are easily provided by high energy excimer lasers such as the Coherent LPXpro and by LSX laser models which can operate at output energies up to 1 J and average output powers up to 540 W.

Date Published: 17 February 2010
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 7581, High Energy/Average Power Lasers and Intense Beam Applications IV, 75810C (17 February 2010); doi: 10.1117/12.838350

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7581:
High Energy/Average Power Lasers and Intense Beam Applications IV
Steven J. Davis; Michael C. Heaven; J. Thomas Schriempf, Editor(s)