Characteristics of extreme ultraviolet emission from Gd plasma produced by dual pulse laser

The extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology, which is required for high-end chip manufacturing, is the first of 35 “neck stuck” key core technologies that China is facing currently. The EUV source with high conversion efficiency is an important part of EUV lithography system. The experiment on dual-pulse irradiated Gd target is carried out to realize the stronger 6.7 nm EUV emission output. Firstly, we compute the contribution of transition arrays of the form 4p-4d and 4d-4f from their open 4d subshell in charge states Gd¹⁸⁺−Gd²⁷⁺, and transition arrays of the form 4d-4f from their open 4d subshell in charge states Gd¹⁴⁺−Gd¹⁷⁺ on the near 6.7 nm EUV source. Subsequently, the experimental results of the dual pulse laser irradiated Gd target show that the intensity of 6.7 nm peak EUV emission decreases first, then increases and drops again due to the plasma density decreasing gradually when the delay time between the pre-pulse and main-pulse increases from 0−500 ns. The strongest intensity of 6.7 nm peak EUV emission is generated when the delay time is 100 ns. At the same time, the spectrum efficiency is higher when the delay time is 100 ns, which is 33% higher than that of single pulse laser. In addition, the experimental results show that the half width of EUV spectrum produced by dual pulse in the delay between 10−500 ns is narrower than that of signal laser pulse due to the fact that the method of dual pulse can suppress the self-absorption effect. The half width is the narrowest when the delay is 30 ns, which is about 1/3 time of EUV spectrum width generated by a single pulse. At the same time, the narrowing of Gd EUV spectrum improves the spectral utilization efficiency near 6.7 nm wavelength (within 0.6% bandwidth).