Luminescence of UV thin films

Luminescence measurements have been set up in order to study the interaction of UV-laser radiation with dielectric thin films. The pulsed laser excitation was carried out at 193-nm (6.4eV), the coating materials comprised wide-band-gap oxides and fluorides. Experiments show the significant optical response of single- and multilayer coatings on the low fluence excitation at sub-band-gap energy. Time- and spectrally-resolved measurements indicate characteristic emission bands of color centers in the deep-UV and vacuum-UV coating materials. An assignment of these optical transitions can be derived from the comparison with known bulk-material studies.