Laser-produced plasma (LPP) devices are being developed as a light
source for the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography applications. One
concern of such devices is to increase the conversion efficiency of laser
energy to EUV light. A new idea based on the initiation and confinement of
cumulative plasma jet inside a hollow laser beam is developed and
simulated. The integrated computer model (HEIGHTS) was used to simulate
the plasma behavior and the EUV radiation output in the LPP devices. The
model takes into account plasma heat conduction and magnetohydrodynamic
processes in a two-temperature approximation, as well as detailed photon
radiation transport in 3D Monte Carlo model. The model employs cylindrical
2D version of a total variation-diminishing scheme (for the plasma
hydrodynamics) and an implicit scheme with the sparse matrix linear solver
(to describe heat conduction). Numerical simulations showed that the EUV
efficiency of the proposed hollow-beam LPP device to be higher than the
current standard devices.