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APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS 92, 251501 ?2008? Ef?cient 13.5 nm extreme ultraviolet emission from Sn plasma irradiated by a long CO2 laser pulse Y. Tao,a? M. S. Tillack, K. L. Sequoia, R. A. Burdt, S. Yuspeh, and F. Najmabadi Center for Energy Research, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093, USA ?Received 17 April 2008; accepted 4 June 2008; published online 23 June 2008? The effect of pulse duration on in-band ?2% bandwidth? conversion ef?ciency ?CE? from a CO2 laser to 13.5 nm extreme ultraviolet ?EUV? light was investigated for Sn plasma. It was found that high in-band CE, 2.6%, is consistently obtained using a CO2 laser with pulse durations from 25 to 110 ns. Employing a long pulse, for example, 110 ns, in a CO2 laser system used in an EUV lithography source could make the system signi?cantly more ef?cient, simpler, and cheaper as compared to that using a short pulse of 25 ns or shorter. ? 2008 American Institute of Physics. ?DOI: 10.1063/1.2951595? The semiconductor industry is developing extreme ultraviolet lithography ?EUVL? as the leading candidate for the next generation lithography tools used to produce microchips with features of 32 nm or less. Great progress in the development of EUVL has been achieved through the intensive efforts in recent years. However, several challenges are still standing on the road to apply EUVL in high volume manufacturing and cost of ownership ?CoO? is at the heart of these challenges.1 In an EUVL system, a powerful and longlifetime in-band ?2% bandwidth? EUV light source is one of the major CoO. The in-band requirement comes from the limited bandwidth of the optics used in EUVL system, i.e., multilayer Mo/ Si mirrors. However, high CoO of high power laser is a critical obstacle to scale to high power. CO2 lasers provide a more hopeful choice due to their relatively low cost, high ef?ciency, and commercially available high power as compared with solid-state lasers.2–4 High in-band CE from