Abstract

Vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) light sources have been extensively developed for many novel applications owing to the high photon energies. Readily operated VUV light sources in compact sizes are in high demand for potential applications such as materials processing and short wavelength lithography. Rare gas excimers are one of the few media to produce VUV light efficiently. We have been investigating efficient high-power VUV laser operation using rare gas excimers and have produced the highest peak power in an argon excimer laser.¹ Such a laser, however, requires a large-scale electron beam machine in order to produce excimer states efficiently because of dominant three body formation processes. Instead of such three-body formation processes, we have proposed a new method to produce rare gas excimers where rare gas clusters produced by a pulsed gas jet are directly excited by discharge electrons.² This cluster excitation requires a relatively low operating gas pressure which is adequate to achieving a stable discharge. This new excimer production method would dramatically down-size VUV laser facilities. Furthermore, efficient VUV lamps in small-sizes could be realized by this method. Extensive studies, therefore, have been done for pulsed gas jet discharges to produce VUV emission from rare gas excimers.

© 1995 IEEE