Nonequilibrium Phases and Phase Transitions in the Surface Melt Morphology of Laser Irradiated Silicon

The increased use of lasers in material processing is directly related to the coherence of the laser beam. It is the spatial coherence property which allows one to direct and/or focus the modest intensity of laser beams onto small areas of semiconductors, metals or insulators, in such high temperature1 processing applications as annealing and melting, or low temperature2 processing applications, such as catalysis, etching or chemical vapor …