Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2011
Laser chemical processing for microfabrication makes use of chemical reactions and phase changes confined to micrometer-scale dimensions at vapor/solid and liquid/solid interfaces. When conditions are established for rapid interfacial reactions, processing speeds can become limited by diffusive transport. These diffusion-limited rates, however, increase by many orders of magnitude as the microreaction geometry is reduced to micrometer lengths using well-focused visible and UV beams. A calculation of the geometric scaling of such rates is summarized here. For realistic conditions, rate increases of up to four decades are predicted relative to corresponding reactions on semi-infinite plane surfaces.
This work was supported by the Army Research Office, the Department of the Air Force, in part under a specific program sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.