Characterization of highly transient EUV emitting discharges

Abstract

The method of disturbed Bilateral Relations (dBR) is used to characterize highly transient plasmas that are used for the generation of Extreme Ultra Violet (EUV), i.e. radiation with a wavelength around 13.5 nm. This dBR method relates equilibrium disturbing to equilibrium restoring processes and follows the degree of equilibrium departure from the global down to the elementary plasma-level. The study gives global values of the electron density and electron temperature. Moreover, it gives a method to construct the atomic state distribution function (ASDF). This ASDF, which is responsible for the spectrum generated by the discharge, is found to be far from equilibrium. There are two reasons for this: first, systems with high charge numbers radiate strongly, second the highly transient behaviour makes that the distribution over the various ionization stages lags behind the temperature evolution. © 2006 IOP Publishing Ltd.