Among the many intense light sources, excimer lasers have a unique set of properties that place them at the forefront of tooling for material processing. Their extreme versatility means that they can be used in many areas of materials science and medicine. But three conditions need to be fulfilled in order that their versatility be truly appreciated and exploited: the characteristics and limitations of the sources must be known; the basic excimer laser processes should become reasonably widely known; and problems in search of a solution should be clearly identified.
Excimer...

Known and developed over the past twenty five years, lasers have been experimented in a variety of processes with an uneven success. Apart from fundamental physics experiments in which the various aspects of coherence are systematically exploited, applications in the field of Materials Science have been scattered recently over so many situations that it is apparently difficult today to conceive a comprehensive interpretation of all physical processes encountered. In some domains of research like photochemistry, development has been fast and rather self-supporting. In others, like solid-state...

Among the many intense light sources, excimer lasers have a unique set of properties that place them at the forefront of tooling for material processing. Their extreme versatility means that they can be used in many areas of materials science and medicine. But three conditions need to be fulfilled in order that their versatility be truly appreciated and exploited: the characteristics and limitations of the sources must be known; the basic excimer laser processes should become reasonably widely known; and problems in search of a solution should be clearly identified.
Excimer...

Known and developed over the past twenty five years, lasers have been experimented in a variety of processes with an uneven success. Apart from fundamental physics experiments in which the various aspects of coherence are systematically exploited, applications in the field of Materials Science have been scattered recently over so many situations that it is apparently difficult today to conceive a comprehensive interpretation of all physical processes encountered. In some domains of research like photochemistry, development has been fast and rather self-supporting. In others, like solid-state...

The impact of Materials Science in our environment has probably never been as massive and decisive as it is today. In every aspect of our lives, progress has never been so dependent on the techniques involved in producing ever more sophisticated materials in ever larger quantities, nor so demanding for technologists to imagine novel processes and circumvent difficulties, or take up new challenges. Every technique is based on a physical process which is put into practice and optimized. The better we know that process, the better the optimization, and more powerful the technique. Laser...