• DOI:10.1063/1.5033541
• Corpus ID: 4691015

Controlling ion kinetic energy distributions in laser produced plasma sources by means of a picosecond pulse pair

@article{Stodlna2018ControllingIK,
  title={Controlling ion kinetic energy distributions in laser produced plasma sources by means of a picosecond pulse pair},
  author={Aneta S. Stod{\'o}lna and Tiago de Faria Pinto and Faisal Ali and Alex Bayerle and Dmitry Kurilovich and Jan Mathijssen and Ronnie Hoekstra and Oscar O. Versolato and Kjeld S. E. Eikema and Stefan Witte},
  journal={Journal of Applied Physics},
  year={2018}
}

• A. Stodólna, Tiago de Faria Pinto, +7 authors S. Witte
• Published 4 April 2018
• Physics
• Journal of Applied Physics

The next generation of lithography machines uses extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light originating from laser-produced plasma (LPP) sources, where a small tin droplet is ionized by an intense laser pulse to emit the requested light at 13.5 nm. Numerous irradiation schemes have been explored to increase conversion efficiency (CE), out of which a double-pulse approach comprising a weak picosecond Nd:YAG pre-pulse followed by a powerful pulse is considered to be very promising [1]. Nevertheless, even for such CE-optimized schemes, ion debris ejected from the plasma with kinetic energies up to several keV remain a factor that hampers the maximum performance of LPP sources. In this letter we propose a novel pre-pulse scheme consisting of a picosecond pulse pair at 1064 nm, which decreases the amount of undesirable fast ions, avoids back-reflections to the lasers and enables one to tailor the target shape.