Photons have many advantages for vaporizing condensed systems, and laser vaporization sources have a flexibility not available with other methods. These sources are applied to making thin films in the well-known technique of pulsed laser deposition (PLD). The vaporized material may be further processed through a pulsed secondary gas, lending the source additional degrees of freedom. Such pulsed-gas sources have long been exploited for fundamental studies, and they are very promising for film deposition, as an alternative to chemical vapor deposition or molecular beam epitaxy. The authors outline the fundamental physics involved and go on to discuss recent experimental findings.

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.72.315