Title screen

[References: 23 tit.]

Extreme ultraviolet (XUV) capillary-discharge lasers (CDLs) are a suitable source for the effi cient, clean ablation of ionic crystals, which are obviously diffi cult to ablate with conventional, long-wavelength lasers. In the present study, a single crystal of cesium iodide (CsI) was irradiated by multiple, focused 1.5-ns pulses of 46.9-nm radiation delivered from a compact XUV-CDL device operated at either 2-Hz or 3-Hz repetition rates. The ablation rates were determined from the depth of the craters produced by the accumulation of laser pulses. Langmuir probes were used to diagnose the plasma plume produced by the focused XUV-CDL beam. Both the electron density and electron temperature were suffi ciently high to confi rm that ablation was the key process in the observed CsI removal. Moreover, a CsI thin fi lm on MgO substrate was prepared by XUV pulsed laser deposition; a fraction of the fi lm was detected by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy.