Laser-induced desorption and damage of water- and heavy water-dosed optical thin films.

Previous work has shown that laser-induced desorption (LID) can prove useful for the determination of surface contamination. However, because of the nature of small-spot sampling utilized in the previous work, it proved rather difficult to gather statistically significant data. A solution to this problem that still allowed sampling the surface with small focused laser spots was to automate the sample manipulation, laser control, and data acquisition of the system. With the automation of the LID facility in place, a detailed study of the LID of water/heavy water (H₂O/D₂O) was undertaken. As in the earlier work, samples were irradiated with a hydrogen fluoride/deuterium fluoride (HF/DF) laser beam focused inside an ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) chamber. The molecules desorbed from the sample surface were partially contained in a glass envelope that also contained a quadrupole mass analyzer. Samples consisted of bulk-etched CaF₂ and optical thin-film coatings of CaF₂--undosed or H₂O/D₂O dosed--on a variety of substrates. Some analysis was performed on cleaved, single-crystal alkali halides. The focused laser spot size was 155 μm (l/e² diameter) for the HF laser and 138 μm (l/e² diameter) for the DF laser. Between 400 and 800 sites per sample were tested for each desorption onset analysis. A study was also performed to test the possibility of correlation between (1) laser-induced damage and defects and (2) laser-induced desorption and adsorption sites for some of the samples listed above. Attempts to deuterate and hydrate CaF₂ thin films met with limited success as laser-induced desorption samples. Other analysis techniques showed that dosing during the coating process produced a more ordered coating; in fact, dosing with H₂O reduced the optical absorption in the "H₂O" band, modified the damage morphology, and, along with a low temperature bakeout, raised the laser-damage threshold