A time-of-flight study of the neutral species produced by nanosecond laser etching of CuCl at 308 nm

A time-of-flight (TOF) study of the particles leaving a CuCl target after irradiation by 15 ns laser pulses at 308 nm is performed. It is shown that the ejected species are Cl, Cu, CuCl, Cu2Cl, Cu2Cl2, and Cu3Cl3. The majority of the products consists of CuCl. The TOF spectra can be fitted by the sum of two contributions: a Maxwell–Boltzmann (MB) and a Gaussian-type (G) distribution. The MB distribution has a temperature of T=6000 K for all masses. The average energy and the standard deviation in the energy of the G contributions are typical for every individual product. The results strongly suggest that the MB contribution is due to a single photon-induced process, whereas the G contribution originates from a multiphoton and/or a multistep process.