A plasma produced by high power laser irradiation of a solid target emits strong X-ray radiation in low photon-energy range (soft X-rays and MN radiation) and is considered to be used in many applications such as X-ray optics, material science, microlithography, and biology1-5. A great disadvantage of the laser plasma X-ray sources is the production of target debris by the laser plasma, that may damage optics and X-ray exposed specimens placed in the interaction chamber. To avoid the debris production we have proposed to irradiate, instead of a solid target, a gas puff target, formed by pulsed injection of a small amount of gas into a laser focus region6-8. Our further studies concentrated on optimization of X-ray production from laser-irradiated xenon gas puff targets in 1-keV photon-energy range for X-ray lithography applications9,10.
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