Excimer lasers: current and future applications in industry and medicine

Abstract

While excimer lasers do not produce as high average powers as longer wavelength infrared lasers such as Nd: YAG and CO₂, in principle their shorter wavelength allows their beams to be focused to smaller spots and obtain high intensities at the workpiece. Nearly all of the applications of excimer lasers realized in industry today and those potential ones on the horizon, make use of the unique manner in which these lasers interact with materials. In many cases the processing of material and the types of structures that the excimer laser is capable of producing are not even possible to achieve by other manufacturing techniques. It is these applications on which we will concentrate. Shown in Table 9.1 are the binding strengths of some of the most common chemical bonds that hold atoms together to form molecules.