Excimer laser
An excimer laser, sometimes more correctly called an exciplex laser, is a form of ultraviolet laser which is commonly used in the production of microelectronic devices, semiconductor based integrated circuits or "chips", eye surgery, and micromachining.
Terminology and history
The term excimer is short for 'excited dimer', while exciplex is short for 'excited complex'. Most excimer lasers are of the noble gas halide type, for which the term excimer is, strictly speaking, a misnomer.The excimer laser was invented in 1970 by Nikolai Basov, V. A. Danilychev and Yu. M. Popov, at the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, using a xenon dimer excited by an electron beam to give stimulated emission at 172 nm wavelength. A later improvement, developed by many groups in 1975 was the use of noble gas halides. These groups include the Avco Everett Research Laboratory, Sandia Laboratories, the Northrop Research and Technology Center, and the United States Government's Naval Research Laboratory who also developed a XeCl Laser that was excited using a microwave discharge.
Construction and operation
An excimer laser typically uses a combination of a noble gas and a gas. Under the appropriate conditions of electrical stimulation and high pressure, a pseudo-molecule called an excimer is created, which can only exist in an energized state and can give rise to laser light in the ultraviolet range.Laser action in an excimer molecule occurs because it has a bound excited state, but a repulsive ground state. Noble gases such as xenon and krypton are highly inert and do not usually form chemical compounds. However, when in an excited state, they can form temporarily bound molecules with themselves or with halogens such as fluorine and chlorine. The excited compound can release its excess energy by undergoing spontaneous or stimulated emission, resulting in a strongly repulsive ground state molecule which very quickly dissociates back into two unbound atoms. This forms a population inversion.
Wavelength determination
The wavelength of an excimer laser depends on the molecules used, and is usually in the ultraviolet:| Excimer | Wavelength | Relative power |
| Ar2* | 126 nm | |
| Kr2* | 146 nm | |
| F2* | 157 nm | |
| Xe2* | 172 & 175 nm | |
| ArF | 193 nm | 60 |
| KrCl | 222 nm | 25 |
| KrF | 248 nm | 100 |
| XeBr | 282 nm | |
| XeCl | 308 nm | 50 |
| XeF | 351 nm | 45 |
Excimer lasers, such as XeF and KrF, can also be made slightly tunable using a variety of prism and grating intracavity arrangements.
Pulse repetition rate
While electron-beam pumped excimer lasers can produce high single energy pulses, they are generally separated by long time periods. An exception was the Electra system, designed for inertial fusion studies, which could produce a burst of 10 pulses each measuring 500 J over a span of 10 s. In contrast, discharge-pumped excimer lasers, also first demonstrated at the Naval Research Laboratory, are able to output a steady stream of pulses. Their significantly higher pulse repetition rates and smaller footprint made possible the bulk of the applications listed in the following section.Major applications
Photolithography
Excimer lasers are widely used in high-resolution photolithography machines, one of the critical technologies required for microelectronic chip manufacturing. Current state-of-the-art lithography tools use deep ultraviolet light from the KrF and ArF excimer lasers with wavelengths of 248 and 193 nanometers, which has enabled transistor feature sizes to shrink to 7 nanometers. Excimer laser lithography has thus played a critical role in the continued advance of the so-called Moore's law for the last 25 years.The most widespread industrial application of excimer lasers has been in deep-ultraviolet photolithography, a critical technology used in the manufacturing of microelectronic devices. Historically, from the early 1960s through the mid-1980s, mercury-xenon lamps had been used in lithography for their spectral lines at 436, 405 and 365 nm wavelengths. However, with the semiconductor industry's need for both higher resolution and higher throughput, the lamp-based lithography tools were no longer able to meet the industry's requirements. This challenge was overcome when in a pioneering development in 1982, deep-UV excimer laser lithography was proposed and demonstrated at IBM by Kanti Jain. With phenomenal advances made in equipment technology in the last two decades, and today microelectronic devices fabricated using excimer laser lithography totaling $400 billion in annual production, it is the semiconductor industry view that excimer laser lithography has been a crucial factor in the continued advance of Moore's law, enabling minimum features sizes in chip manufacturing to shrink from 800 nanometers in 1990 to 7 nanometers in 2018. From an even broader scientific and technological perspective, since the invention of the laser in 1960, the development of excimer laser lithography has been highlighted as one of the major milestones in the 50-year history of the laser.
Medical uses
The ultraviolet light from an excimer laser is well absorbed by biological matter and organic compounds. Rather than burning or cutting material, the excimer laser adds enough energy to disrupt the molecular bonds of the surface tissue, which effectively into the air in a tightly controlled manner through ablation rather than burning. Thus excimer lasers have the useful property that they can remove exceptionally fine layers of surface material with almost no heating or change to the remainder of the material which is left intact. These properties make excimer lasers well suited to precision micromachining organic material, or delicate surgeries such as eye surgery LASIK. In 1980–1983, Rangaswamy Srinivasan, Samuel Blum and James J. Wynne at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center observed the effect of the ultraviolet excimer laser on biological materials. Intrigued, they investigated further, finding that the laser made clean, precise cuts that would be ideal for delicate surgeries. This resulted in a fundamental patent and Srinivasan, Blum and Wynne were elected to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002. In 2012, the team members were honored with National Medal of Technology and Innovation by the President of The United States Barack Obama for their work related to the excimer laser. Subsequent work introduced the excimer laser for use in angioplasty. Xenon chloride excimer lasers can also treat a variety of dermatological conditions including psoriasis, vitiligo, atopic dermatitis, alopecia areata and leukoderma.As light sources, excimer lasers are generally large in size, which is a disadvantage in their medical applications, although their sizes are rapidly decreasing with ongoing development.
Research is being conducted to compare differences in safety and effectiveness outcomes between conventional excimer laser refractive surgery and wavefront-guided or wavefront-optimized refractive surgery, as wavefront methods may better correct for higher-order aberrations.