Diffractive shaping of excimer-laser beams for pulsed laser deposition

Abstract

We present a beam-shaping system for a pulsed laser deposition setup. This system is based on two diffractive beam-splitter gratings and is able to produce 2*2-mm2 flat-top distributions of UV light with a fluence of 3 J/cm2 on the target some 30 cm behind the system. We have applied the setup to deposit ferromagnetic Ni-Mn-Ga films