A Kinetic Study of Laser Ablation of Cupric Chloride using Time resolved Mass Spectrometry

The kinetics of laser ablation of cupric chloride at 355nm has been investigated by time-resolved mass spectrometric method. The measured time-of-flight （TOF） spectra for both neutral and ionic products, such as CuCl,CuCl₂,Cu₃Cl₃,Cu₄Cl₄ and Cu+, can be fitted by different typies of Maxwell-Boltzmann distributions. The dependence of the relative yield of ablation products on laser fluence is not the same for the different kinds of products. This result implies that the process for the CuCl and CuCl₂ formation is different from that of Cu₃Cl₃ and Cu₄Cl₄. The proposed mechanism for UV laser ablation of cupric chloride involves the laserinduced plasma heating, the evaporation and decomposition of CuCl₂, target as well as the collisional congelation of the CuCl species to generate the clusters of Cu₃Cl₃ and Cu₄Cl₄.