Ultra-short pulsed laser deposition of gallium arsenide: a comprehensive study

A Gallium Arsenide target has been ablated by using a frequency-doubled Nd:glass laser with a pulse duration of 250 fs and thin films have been deposited in vacuum. The plasma produced by the ablation process and the deposited films have been studied by several different techniques, including optical emission spectroscopy, ICCD fast imaging and electron microscopies, X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, respectively. The data evidence that the films, which composition shows an excess of Ga, are formed by the coalescence of a large number of nanoparticles. These results, even if the plasma does not evidence the presence of nanoparticles, seem to indicate that the ablation-deposition mechanism is the same found for the majority of the other systems deposited by ultra-short pulse lasers. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.