Modeling of Capillary Discharge Plasma for X-ray lasers, XUV Lithography and other Applications

Abstract

It is long ago recognized that Z-pinches represent very natural medium for x-ray lasers (XRL) due to its favorable geometry and achievable high densities and temperatures. They also are very efficient x-ray sources. One of their variants, the capillary discharges, attracted attention of plasma physics researchers for almost two decades. It has been used for hot dense plasma formation and x-ray lasers [1,2], for transportation of laser beams and XUV radiation generation in x-ray lithography[3,4], for basic Z-pinch research and some others. The combination of efficiency, simplicity and low cost of capillary electrical discharges allowed to scale capillary x-ray lasers to table-top dimensions. In this paper we show the modeling results for next, 3–4 times shorter wavelength x-ray lasers. As an efficient x-ray source of line and continuum radiation it can be used for many practically important application in science and technology. In particular, the capillary discharge can appear as powerful potential candidate for emerging XUV microlithography. We present here the results of numerical modeling of spectra and density of Xe EUV source which involved plasma heating and dynamics, detailed atomic kinetics and radiation transport and material ablation physics.