Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13:

The rapid development of laser sources opens up new and fascinating ways for using light as a tool to characterize and modify surfaces and thin films. Quite remarkable progress is being made in improving lasers in their performance with respect to power, tunability, or generation of ultrashort light pulses. In particular, the application of laser diodes both as a direct light source and for pumping other laser materials is flourishing. Among the laser methods for surface treatment and modification a large variety of processes are under investigation, such as etching by laser induced chemical reactions, annealing and cleaning of semiconductor surfaces, or the maskless production of submicron periodic structures. Also film deposition by means of laser processing is widely being used, including high temperature superconductors and diamond like films. In laser diagnostics new time domains have become accessible by optical microscopy with femtosecond light pulses, and nonlinear effects are exploited e.g. to characterize adsorbates by their nonlinear optical response, or magnetic interfaces by means of the nonlinear magnetooptic Kerr effect. New materials with characteristic dimensions on nanoscopic scales - a particularly prominent example being porous silicon - are attracting tremendous attraction due to quantum size effects which give rise to novel optical phenomena not observed in the corresponding bulk materials. As a result of this wealth of developments it is difficult yet essential to obtain thorough reviews of the field, covering fundamental aspects as well as applications. For the latter, it is also very important to realize which processes are already well accepted in industry, which phenomena may not be so suitable for industrial purposes, and which are the most desirable new directions to go.