Laser Ablation and the Production of Polymer Films

Abstract

The formation of high-quality thin films of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) is important in many applications ranging from material reinforcement to molecular electronics. Laser ablation, a technique widely used to deposit a variety of inorganic materials, can also be used as a simple and highly versatile method for forming thin polymer films. The data presented show that PTFE films can be produced on various supports by the evaporation of a solid PTFE target with a pulsed ultraviolet laser. The composition of the ablation plume suggests that PTFE ablation and subsequent film formation occur by way of a laser-induced pyrolitic decomposition with subsequent repolymerization. The polymer films produced by this method are composed of amorphous and highly crystalline regions, the latter being predominantly in a chain-folded configuration with the molecular axis aligned parallel to the substrate surface.

Organic solid‐state integrated amplifiers and lasers

“…Thin film deposition technology is the main tool for development of such integrated sources, aiming at forming a waveguiding layer of the gain medium on a substrate of lower refractive index. There is a wealth of methods that can be applied to form organic layers, including, thermal sublimation, solution inkjet printing [42], electrostatic layer-by-layer self-assembly [43], plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition [44], pulsed laser deposition (PLD) [45], matrix-assisted pulsed laser evaporation [46], atmospheric-pressure ion deposition [47] and electrospray deposition [48]. Amongst these film deposition techniques the prevailing ones are solution processing and thermal sublimation and have also been successfully www.lpr-journal.org…”

Substrate temperature dependence of the structure of polythiophene thin films obtained by Matrix Assisted Pulsed Laser Evaporation (MAPLE)

“…The number of pulses delivered by the laser for each sample was 45000. 6 The vacuum deposition chamber contained a copper target holder of 2 ml capacity in thermal contact with liquid nitrogen contained in an external reservoir, so that it was possible to freeze the target in situ. The target holder was provided with a two-dimensional automatic movement system that allowed the full scan of a rectangular area on the target to avoid overheating and drilling.…”

“…In particular the photochemical decomposition produced by direct interaction of laser radiation with the material. In fact, even if some polymers have been successfully deposited with PLD, the mechanism of deposition, consisting in a pyrolitic decomposition followed by a re-polymerisation on the substrate, can work only with addition polymers [6]. 4 In MAPLE, a pulsed laser beam impacts a target made of a dilute frozen solution of the polymer in a volatile and light absorbing solvent.…”

Two-Photon Polymerization of Inorganic-Organic Hybrid Polymers as Scalable Technology Using Ultra-Short Laser Pulses

“…Well-established methods such as laser welding (Sieben & Brunnecker, 2009;El-Bataghy, 1997;Song et al, 2009), laser ablation (Conforti et al, 2007;Baudach et al, 2000;Spyridaki et al, 2003;Blanchet et al, 1993), and direct laser writing (Schweizer et al, 2008;Koechlin et al, 2009) were improved concomitantly with the laser quality (e.g. beam profile) or the laser energy (e.g.…”