ABSTRACT : A direct laser ablation film deposition on powder sample has been made on this study.

A vertical hole was drilled in an alluminium block with a diameter of 3 mm and 13 mm depth. The GaN powder sample was then filled into the hole with the height of around 1.5 mm. Direct laser ablation was then conducted on this powder by focusing 116 mJ Q-sw YAG laser on the surface of powder in the hole at 2 Torr of air and as a result a nearly hemispherical confined shock wave plasma was produced over the hole. By using pure silicone and glass substrate placed near the exit of the hole, the plasma was deposited on the substrate making GaN thin film. Fluorescence spectra taken at room temperature of 300 K, showed the energy bandgap is to be around 3.35 eV. The X-ray diffraction spectrum also confirmed the lattice constant of GaN film over the substrate. It is stressed that this technique is very useful because we can easily make film using only a small amount of material which is completely not enough to make pellet as a laser abalation target. KEYWORDS : laser ablation method, direct powder film deposition, confined shock wave plasma, bandgap energy. E-MAIL : kurnia18@cbn.net.id

1. INTRODUCTION GaN is one of promising families of electronic device. With the direct bandgap energy of 3.4 eV, the growth of this high quality crystals will lead to applications in the optoelectronic devices in the ultraviolet spectrum region [1-3]. Recently, the use of pulsed laser film deposition has become popular in the field of new material development such as superconductor due to its simplicity among all thin filmgrowth techniques [4], and recently this techniques has been applied to GaN film production. This laser film deposition technique attributes to many advantages. The advantages are flexibility, fast response, energetic evaporants and congruent evaporation. For laser film deposition method , pellet sample with adequate hardness is irradiated by pulsed laser light. This requirements brings several difficulties such as a large amount of powder sample is needed to make a pellet leading to high cost film deposition , also during the process of pellet production impurities might be contaminated.

In our previous continuing work, we ave reported that excellent plasma source for spectrochemical analysis could be generated if the target hard enough and the interaction between the laser irradiation and sample surface should be conducted at a surrounding gas pressure of around several Torr. Using unique technique of time-resolved emissions specstroscopy and density jump measurements, developed in our labolatoriy , we poved that the plasma is excited by the shock wave. We have referred those techniques as a laser induced shock wave plasma spectroscopy (LISPS) [8-11]. On the other hand , direct sample irradiation on the powder sample will only cause a blowing of effect of the sample and no plasma production could be observed. For the same reason, laser film deposition basically cannot be made from the powder sample. However , in our recents studies , we have proved that using a unique powder container , a direct spectrochemical analysis could be conducted on powder samples [7]. In this connection , it was also proved that the characteristics generated plasma from alkali halide powder samples, KBr and NaCl so on, were essentially the same as those madeof hard pellet samples, indicating that the plasma from the powder is also excited by the shock wave. Based on the above studies , a film deposition production of GaN material using our unique combination of shock wave plasma and direct ablation of powder sample was conducted.

Figure 1 : .. 2. EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURE. Fig. 1 shows the schematic diagram of the sample holder , substrate location and the direction of the laser irradiation. A hole with a diameter of 3 mm was made in the alluminium block. The depth of the hole was set at 13 mm. The GaN powder was roughly 1.5 mm only. This volume of GaN powder was roughly equal to 60 mg which is extremely lower than those I we used pellet (5 gr powder for pellet with a diameter of 10 mm and thickness of 1 mm). The distance of the substrate from the edge of the hole was set roughly at 3 mm. In this experiments , silicone and ordinary slide glass was used as substrate and no heating treatment in the substrate was applied during all of this experiments.

A laser irradiation from Q-sw Nd-YAG laser in its fundamental wavelength with energy of 116 mJ and pulse duration of 8 ns was operated at 10 Hz and the shot to shot fluctuation of the laser energy was estimated to be around 3 %.

FIGURE 2: 3. EXPERIMENTAL RESULT AND DISCUSSION. Fig. 2 shows the plasma produced when the laser irradiation of Q-sw Nd-YAG laser of energy 116 mJ was focused onto the GaN powder in the alluminium hole under the surrounding air pressure of 2 Torr. It is clearly seen that the plasma shape is nearly hemispherical as we have reported before [6-11]. The blue color of the plasma was mainly comes from the emission of Ga I 403.2 nm (excitation energy of 3.1 eV) and Ga I 417.2 nm (excitation energy of 3.1 eV) and Ga I 641.3 nm (excitation energy of 5 eV). The blue color spectrum region can be seen in fig 3. This spectra was taken by using time-intregrated mode of optical multichannel analyzer (OMA system). To prove that This GaN powder plasma was exsited by the shock wave mechanism as we have resported by using metalic samples [8-11], a Ga ingot with a diameter of 3mm and thickness of 1.5 mm was filled into the aliminum hole in replace of GaN podwer samples. It is proved that the intensivity of the emission lines increase to about two times with a same ratio as compared to GaN powder samples. The reduction of the emission intensivity in the case of GaN podwer samples was mainly due to the absorbption of the laser energy by the podwer samples and as a result the recoil energy from the sample surface becomes weak and this will cause in the reduction of the gushing speed of the ablated material and as a result the kinetic energy which was use to excite the atoms becomes lower in the case of podwer samples [8-11]. However, it should be noted that the ratio between the emission intensities of Ga I 417.2 nm to that of Ga I 641.3 nm was quite tha same.

FIGURE 3 :.. FIGURE 4 : ..

Figure 5. the fluorescence spectra of the GaN film on silicone substrate.

Figure 6. X-ray diffraction pattern of the GaN film using ordinary microscope slides glass

It means that the temperature of the plasma generated using GaN podwer sample and Ga ingot was quite the same. Figure.4 shows the picture of the GaN film using silicone substrate without heating the substrate. From this picture we can see the interference pattern. The film thickness was estimated to be araound several hundred nanometers. This film was made under the sorounding air pressure of around 2 Torr 9,600 laser shots of Q-sw Nd-YAG laser of 116 mJ was used to make this film. In order to observe the homogeneity of the produced film, an optical microscope was used in this experiments and it is confirmed that no particles size larger than 2mm could be observed on the surface of the film. Figure.5 shows the fluorescence spectra oh the GaN filmon silicone substrate. The fluorescence spectra was taken by using time-integrated OMA system under the irradiation of high repetition and high stability nitrogen laser. Prior to irradiation on GaN film, we confirmed that no fluorescence effect taking place in pure silicone sample. From the spectra it is clearly seen that the peak of the wavelengeth was around 370nm which is equal to 3.35 eV. In order to characterize the GaN film production, the GaN film was made on ordinary microscope slide glass and using the x-ray diffraction technique, we confirmed the predominantly crystallographic directions of 0002 ordered as can be seen in Fig. 6. It should be noted that this result is very surprising, because we used the ordinary slide glass, which is not a crystal substrate and also the film producation was conducted without subatrate heating.

4. CONCLUSION

We have demostrated the feasibility of direct laser ablation GaN film deposition from podwer sample by using a new design sample holder. It is stressed that this technique is very useful because we can easly make film by using only a small amount of material which is completely not enough to make pelet as a laser ablation target. Fluorescence spectra taken at room temperature of 3.35 eV. Further study by heating the substrate is on progress and will be reported in the near future.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The authors wish to express their sincerest thanks to prof. Kiichiro Kagawa of Fukui University for this guidance during the experiment.