Liquid film enhanced laser cleaning

'Liquid Film Enhanced Laser Cleaning" is a technique to remove particulate contamination from surfaces. A thin liquid film deposited onto the contaminated surface is flood irradiated with a short laser pulse. The resulting sudden evaporation of the liquid film leads to high transient explosive forces, large enough to expel even submicron particles from the surface. For instance 0.1μm alumina particles could efficiently be removed from a silicon surface with KrF excimer laser irradiation of 16 ns pulse length and 120 mJ/cm2 energy density. © 1992.