Excimers industrial applications

Proceedings Excimer Lasers for Fusion and Industrial Applications (Abstracts Collection) Editors L. Cemoli and S. Martellucci. Publisher University of Rome Tor Vergata (to be... 

For industrial applications of excimer UV sources, the dielectric barrier and the microwave discharge are simple, reliable, and efficient excitation modes. There are a large number of vacuum UV (VUV), UV, and visible light transitions available. This allows a selective photoexcitation for many systems. Some sources of monochromatic UV light for industrial applications and their characteristics are in Table 2.1. 

While any of the above sources find specific applications, mercury, excimer and xenon lamps are most widely used in industrial applications. 

ABB Infocom, New Excimer UV Sources for Industrial Applications, Publication CH-E 3.30833.0 E. 

The capability to control an excimer laser beam also is exploited in the semiconductor industry, where these lasers are used to etch elaborate features during the fabrication of semiconductor chips. Neil Bartlett probably never dreamed that his explorations of the chemistry of xenon would lead to such exotic applications. 

Excimer lasers are of great importance for UV and vacuum UV (VUV) spectroscopy and photochemistry. They are also found in a wide range of applications. For example, they are used in micromachine medical devices, including refractive surgery, in photo-lithography for the microelectronics industry, for material processing, as optical pump sources for other type of lasers (dyes), and so on. More details about excimer lasers can be found in Rodhes (1979). 

Besides the valuable information obtained from the companies cited in Refs. 2 and 3, cooperation with Atochem Elf-Aquitaine (Paris and Pierre-Benite, France), E. I. DuPont de Nemours Company (Wilmington, Delaware, USA) and Ems-Dottikon AG (Dottikon, Switzerland) in the domain of industrial photochemistry, as well as with Asea Brown Boveri AG (Baden, Switzerland) for the technical application of excimer light sources in photochemistry, provided many interesting discussions, new insights in problems of industrial chemistry, and valuable new tools for their solution. 

In addition, a novel generation of lamps with promising features for photochemical applications has been developed to industrial maturity over the last decade, the so-called incoherent excimer radiation sources (Eliasson et al., 1988). Note that these lamps are not laser sources. In contrast to well-known excimer lasers, excimer lamps are operated under different physical conditions and they emit incoherent electromagnetic radiation. Whereas pulsed laser radiation can reach very high irradiances, E up to 100 MW m , the irradiance E of excimer lamps is only in the range of 1000 W m . ... 

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