It is hard to judge quality of CaF2 window from its nominal specification, because suppliers are used to testing products performance under relatively weak spectral lines from lamp, which can not tell the real operation behavior of CaF2 window under intense laser irradiation. We report a method of testing the transmissivity of three different grade commercially available CaF2 windows under high pulse repetition rate laser irradiation at 193nm, and the lab prototype of test module distinguishes them well with a repeatability better than 2%.
Due to complex kinetics of formation and loss mechanisms, such as ion-ion recombination reaction, neutral species harpoon reaction, excited state quenching and photon absorption, as well as their interactions, the performance behavior of different laser gas medium parameters for excimer laser varies greatly. Therefore, the effects of gas composition and total gas pressure on excimer laser performance attract continual research studies. In this work, orthogonal experimental design (OED) is used to investigate quantitative and qualitative correlations between output laser energy characteristics and gas medium parameters for an ArF excimer laser with plano-plano optical resonator operation. Optimized output laser energy with good pulse to pulse stability can be obtained effectively by proper selection of the gas medium parameters, which makes the most of the ArF excimer laser device. Simple and efficient method for gas medium optimization is proposed and demonstrated experimentally, which provides a global and systematic solution. By detailed statistical analysis, the significance sequence of relevant parameter factors and the optimized composition for gas medium parameters are obtained. Compared with conventional route of varying single gas parameter factor sequentially, this paper presents a more comprehensive way of considering multivariables simultaneously, which seems promising in striking an appropriate balance among various complicated parameters for power scaling study of an excimer laser.
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