An adiabatic thermalization model of the atoms ejected from the target into the background gas is developed to describe a typical pulsed laser deposition (PLD) process. The model gives a physical definition of the “plume range”, calculates the range values for a particular PLD system, and predicts an extremely weak dependence of optimized deposition rate (about 1 Å per pulse) on plume pulse intensity. It is shown that, for a practical PLD system, the gas pressure is not an independent optimization parameter.