Beam Processing And Laser Chemistry

This volume discusses both the practical and theoretical aspects of energy beam materials processing. It highlights the recent advances in the use of beams and incoherent light sources to enhance or modify chemical processes at solid surfaces. Special attention is given to the latest developments in the use of ion, electron and photon beams, and on laser-assisted process chemistry. Thin film and surface and interface reactions as well as bulk phase transformations are discussed. Practical technological details and the criteria for present and future applications are also reviewed. The papers collected in this volume reflect the continuing strong interest and variety of development in this field.

Laser Processing and Chemistry gives an overview of the fundamentals and applications of laser-matter interactions, in particular with regard to laser material processing. Special attention is given to laser-induced physical and chemical processes at gas-solid, liquid-solid, and solid-solid interfaces. Starting with the background physics, the book proceeds to examine applications of laser techniques in micro-machining, and the patterning, coating, and modification of material surfaces. This fourth edition has been revised and enlarged to cover new topics such as 3D microfabrication, advances in nanotechnology, ultrafast laser technology and laser chemical processing (LCP). Graduate students, physicists, chemists, engineers, and manufacturers alike will find this book an invaluable reference work on laser processing.

This book provides an introduction on applications of lasers in Chemistry. It describes laser as a tool for chemistry, the consideration involved in describing a laser beam and what happens to beam as it is propagated through a gas. The book is useful for graduates and advanced undergraduates.

It has often been said that the laser is a solution searching for a problem. The rapid development of laser technology over the past dozen years has led to the availability of reliable, industrially rated laser sources with a wide variety of output characteristics. This, in turn, has resulted in new laser applications as the laser becomes a familiar processing and analytical tool. The field of materials science, in particular, has become a fertile one for new laser applications. Laser annealing, alloying, cladding, and heat treating were all but unknown 10 years ago. Today, each is a separate, dynamic field of research activity with many of the early laboratory experiments resulting in the development of new industrial processing techniques using laser technology. Ten years ago, chemical processing was in its infancy awaiting, primarily, the development of reliable tunable laser sources. Now, with tunability over the entire spectrum from the vacuum ultraviolet to the far infrared, photo chemistry is undergoing revolutionary changes with several proven and many promising commercial laser processing operations as the result. The ability of laser sources to project a probing beam of light into remote or hostile environments has led to the development of a wide variety of new analytical techniques in environmental and laboratory analysis. Many of these are reviewed in this book.

Laser-Beam Interactions with Materials treats, from a physicist's point of view, the wide variety of processes that lasers can induce in materials. Physical phenomena ranging from optics to shock waves are discussed, as are applications in such diverse fields as semiconductor annealing, hole drilling and fusion plasma production. The approach taken emphasizes the fundamental ideas and their interrelations. The newcomer is given the necessary important background material, while the active research worker finds a critical and comprehensive review of the field.

The possibility of initiating chemical reactions by high-intensity laser exci tation has captured the imagination of chemists and physicists as well as of industrial scientists and the scientifically informed public in general ever since the laser first became available. Initially, great hopes were held that laser-induced chemistry would revolutionize synthetic chemistry, making possible "bond-specific" or "mode-specific" reactions that were impos sible to achieve under thermal equilibrium conditions. Indeed, some of the early work in this area, typically employing high-power continuous-wave sources, was interpreted in just this way. With further investigation, however, a more conservative picture has emerged, with the laser taking its place as one of a number of available methods for initiation of high-energy chemical transformations. Unlike a number of these methods, such as flash photolysis, shock tubes, and electron-beam radiolysis, the laser is capable of a high degree of spatial and molecular localization of deposited energy, which in turn is reflected in such applications as isotope enrichment or localized surface treatments. The use of lasers to initiate chemical processes has led to the discovery of several distinctly new molecular phenomena, foremost among which is that of multiple-photon excitation and dissociation of polyatomic molecules. This research area has received the greatest attention thus far and forms the focus of the present volume.

Containing the proceedings of three symposia in the E-MRS series this book is divided into two parts. Part one is concerned with ion beam processing, a particularly powerful and versatile technology which can be used both to synthesise and modify materials, including metals, semiconductors, ceramics and dielectrics, with great precision and excellent control. Furthermore it also deals with the correlated effects in atomic and cluster ion bombardment and implantation. Part two deals with the deposition techniques, characterization and applications of advanced ceramic, metallic and polymeric coatings or thin films for surface protection against corrosion, erosion, abrasion, diffusion and for lubrication of contracting surfaces in relative motion.