Plasma and Thin Film Analysis
Mass spectrometry
Combining quadrupole mass selector with kinetic energy selector
The mass spectroscopy setup enables a better understanding of the species composition (left figure) and their respective energy distribution in the plasma (right figure). Information about the detected positive, negative and neutral species in the laser induced plasma can also be obtained. However, for neutral species only a qualitative analysis is possible to to the unkonwn ionisation cross sections of the arriving species.
Langmuir probe
Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS)
Plasma Imaging and Spectroscopy
Complementary to mass spectroscopy, we investigate the excited species in the laser induced plasma by emission spectroscopy. The first photo shows the experimental imaging/spectroscopy set-up where an image of the laser induced plasma is projected onto the entrance slid of the monochrometer via the indicated optical beam path. Through the combination of different delay times, we can record a spatially and time resolved emission spectrum of the plasma (top right image). The second image shows a La0.6Ca0.4MnO3 spectrum recorded with the spectrometer set-up between 500 and 520nm. Bottom: excitation lines published in the NIST database for the same wavelenght range.

As an example of selected line imaging using an AOTF, the next images show the spatial distributions of Ag and Ar excited neutrals at the same time frame of 1.4µs. The AOTF selected optical excitation lines were 827.35 nm for Ag I and 811.53 nm for Ar I. For each image 100 accumulations were used to increase image resolution. The gradients are normalized to the maximum counts for each image. More details can be found in J. Appl. Phys. 120, 225301 (2016).

