New lab equipment

Two groups have recently developed new equipment for their labs. The Contact Dynamics group installed a ‘presliding wear tool’, developed in collaboration with Philips Innovation Services, ASML and AMOLF. The EUV Plasma Processes group constructed a second tin droplet-generator setup, together with the AMOLF workshops.

Presliding wear tool

The Contact Dynamics group has recently installed the ‘presliding wear tool’, a new tool developed in collaboration with Philips Innovation Services, ASML and AMOLF. Group leader Bart Weber explains that with this instrument his group can investigate how the interface between two nanoscale materials deforms when macroscopic external forces are applied to this interface.

“These types of deformations, influenced by external forces, determine the positioning of wafers in nanolithography machines. This positioning is essential for making smaller structures in chips. We can now measure this mechanical behavior as a function of wear, that makes this tool special; we can take up to 100,000 measurements without replacing the surfaces we work with. In this way we gain insight into the interplay between wear and nanometer deformations of relatively large interfaces. Commercial setups that can measure this behavior simply do not exist. That’s why we developed the machine ourselves.”

Photo
Left: Presliding wear tool (by Junxiao Du). Right: Tin droplet-generator setup (by Wessel Zwart)

Tin droplet-generator

“In de midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, and in part because of it, we started an ambitious project – to build a second droplet-generator setup at ARCNL in the EUV Plasma Processes lab, for studying the generation of plasma from tin micro-droplets using lasers”, says Oscar Versolato of the EUV Plasma Processes group. “We started up this project in December 2020 and with the hard work and enthusiasm from the AMOLF workshops and ARCNL researchers, our first experiments started already mid-April 2021 with a first successful droplet ‘beamtime’.”

The new setup enables the researchers to fully focus on a new research topic that is closely related to the preparation of tin targets in industrial sources of extreme ultraviolet light, using carefully tuned laser pulses from the nearby EUV Generation & Imaging lab. The core of the new setup is a vacuum chamber shaped by the AMOLF workshop from a solid, and particularly massive, piece of steel.