Coherent Corp. (COHR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to our Coherent Amplify webinar about Pulsed Laser Deposition. So my name is Oliver Haupt, and I'm part of the Coherent Strategic Marketing team. It's my pleasure to be your host today. We have compiled an existing agenda and program with 3 talks today about Pulsed Laser Deposition. Ralph Delmdahl from Coherent, he will give us an overview about global trends and laser solutions for Pulsed Laser Deposition. Second, Hagen Grüttner from ANTACON in Germany, he will talk about PLD-made carbon coatings, the ultimate in wear protection. I must announce a last-minute change contrary to the web and invitations out for this event. We have some technical issues with the talk from Ray Karam from High Temperature Superconductors and now Ralph Delmdahl will cover the same exciting topic as shown in our agenda. It's about PLD for high-temperature superconducting tapes. Ray's talk will be included in a replay of this event, so you will be able to see and listen to his talk later on. Before we are going on to the talks, here is some housekeeping information. We would like to ask you to ask your questions in the chat at any time, and the team will try to answer most of them during the Q&A session at the end of the program. There will also be a couple of polls, so please participate. In addition, we will feature our social channels in the chat. Please follow us to stay updated on exciting development for Coherent. I see that a lot of people still joining the session. So before we start the talks I would like you to take a minute to answer poll question, which will pop up on your screen shortly. We would like to get a better idea of the work you currently do. So please choose the answer that most applicable for you. Yes. Well, great. Yes. I see, a lot of votes are coming in. And yes, some are planning not, some don't have a specific time line, but most of them of the answers are now showing their plan to do it with 1 year. So this is great for us to know. Thanks for participating. Yes, very interesting results. We are hoping that you will find the talks insightful. With this, now let me hand over to the first speaker, Ralph Delmdahl. Ralph, the stage is yours.

Hello to all of you watching our first Amplify event on Pulsed Laser Deposition. Let me start by saying that I have followed the evolution of Pulsed Laser Deposition over the last 20 years. And I'm convinced that this fantastic deposition technology is now at a crossroad in terms of it being able to address many of today's thin film requirements on an industrial level. For those of you who are new to Pulsed Laser Deposition, let me give you a brief introduction, so we have everybody on the same page. In Pulsed Laser Deposition, a high-energy UV laser pulse is guided into a vacuum chamber and is absorbed by a solid target containing the desired composition. The laser evaporates the target material in the so-called plume and the atoms deposit on the nearby substrate as a thin film with the same chemical composition. This, in fact, is specific strong point of PLD film growth. Pulsed Laser Deposition has seen increasing scientific interest to this day as the red curve in the Google Scholar citations indicates a big thank you at this point to Larry Scipioni from company PVD Products for providing this nice overview graph. So where does the growing interest in PLD come from? Well, this has much to do with its unique advantages for thin film growth. In a nutshell, it is the direct one-to-one material transfer even for the most complex materials. Also, the wide availability ablation targets leading in turn to a large choice of materials, which can be deposited over wide thickness range from monolayers to microns. Last but definitely not least, PLD allows fine-tuning a host of thin film properties via independently selecting the laser parameters and the background gas conditions. For example, film density and even film stress can be controlled. And in case of sensitive substrates such as organics, also low-impact energy and low substrate temperature parameters can be chosen. Let us now see how the laser technology ties in. From the ablation laser perspective, nanosecond pulsed UV excimer lasers are predominantly used in PLD setups due to their short wavelength in combination with high pulse energy, providing the required absorption and fluence range for evaporating almost all target materials. The flat top beam supports deposition at well-defined energy density and all of it together leads to the desired tracemetric target to substrate material transfer and to superior thin film quality. At the end of the day, however, results are to be scaled up in order to be transferred to the production floor. To this end, the employed laser technology must allow power scaling which Excimer lasers are extremely good at. PLD lab research is characterized by optimizing thin film deposition recipes relying on single-digit repetition rate and few watts of power at hundreds of millijoules of UV pulse energy. Here, the air cooled complex Excimer laser platform has become the standard laser for the leading PLD research labs over years. With the lab-to-fab transition of Pulsed Laser Deposition gaining momentum, we recognized years ago that our 600-watt to multi-kilowatt UV laser platforms dedicated to display panel processing were not cost-effective for PLD manufacturers. So we created a new line of high-power UV Excimer lasers inspired by industrial PLD, the LEAP platform. While maintaining low maintenance and high uptime, the LEAP platform could be reduced in technical complexity as compared to the display lasers to better match the demands of the PLD ablative process window. Today, the LEAP Excimer laser platform spans a wide range of stabilized power levels from 80 watts to 300 watts and more in the future, enabling free shift PLD manufacturing at industrial deposition rates and has become the backbone of the industrial PLD markets. Coherent is a long-standing partner to the PLD community and today, close to 1,000 mostly complex and LEAP lasers support PLD thin film deposition in labs and fabs all around the globe. Besides tracemetric target ablation with the Excimer laser, we find further Coherent laser technologies, which are beneficial for PLD thin film making in labs and fabs. Small targets in PLD lab research can be diode laser heated at fast rate and precisely temperature stabilized at over 1,000 degrees Celsius. The UV photons of Excimer lasers are also used for large area post annealing of PLD grown thin films to induce or alter certain physical properties. For precision cutting and structuring of PLD-made thin films and even delicate multilayer films, femtosecond lasers of the Monaco series are the first choice. In my last part, let's have a quick look at the basic system implications of scaling up the substrate size in PLD. In PLD research, tiny substrates of the size of the plume area are used and the homogeneous film is achieved automatically when the plume is directed to the substrate. This is not the case for much larger industrial substrates as, for example, a 6-inch wafer. For 100 and more times larger industry-relevant substrate areas, therefore, PLD system technology includes technologies to synchronously move substrate target and also laser beam which is essential to achieve homogeneous deposition across the substrate, which exceeds the plume area by far. Industrial large area PLD substrates now include wafers and panels but also long tapes and even 3 dimensional substrates. With the technology in place, we see PLD thin films now excel in more and more emerging industries where unique thin film aspects of PLD are key. In summary, I think it is safe to say that decades of thin film research and the evolution of lasers as well as system technology has turned PLD today into a viable industrial solution for coating and thin film manufacturing. That said, I'm happy to pass the word to our invited industrial PLD manufacturers.

So first of all, thank you very much for the invitation and the opportunity to introduce ANTACON and its PLD-made super hard carbon coatings. First of all, let me tell you some words about the origin of ANTACON. We are a typical start-up from University of Applied Science or to be more precise from the Laser Institute of Hochschule Mittweida. The LAM is one of the leading German research institutes in the field of laser technology. Just to give you a brief overview of core topics are, for example, laser micromachining, bionics or additive manufacturing of course, modeling and simulation and biophotonics. And one of the core topics here is the Pulsed Laser Deposition of super hard coatings. We are located, as I mentioned in Mittweida, this is in Eastern Germany. And based on some pretty good results in the field of Pulsed Laser Deposition of hard coatings, we founded the ANTACON GmbH in the year of 2021. Here on the picture, you see the founders. The problem we address is the wear of tools and components in industrial environments, which causes high economic losses due to replacements or revisions of your tools and components and even due to production failures and maintenance costs. So the best way to protect your tools and components is to do some surface treatment, and this is what we are doing. We invented a new wheel protection coating based on carbon. It's in the group of diamond-like carbon coatings and has outstanding properties. In wheel protection applications, there are often one rule that fits very well, and that says the harder the coating, the better the protection behavior. So let me tell you something about the hardness of our coatings. We measure the hardness in gigapascal. For example, steel has 5 and Diamond has 100. It is quite simple scale. You see coatings available on the market have hardnesses up to 50 gigapascal and this is where we start with our coatings, we can go up to 70 gigapascal. So our USP is not only the extreme hardness. Our coatings also have no internal stress, and this is new. And this enables us to go up to that high hardness and we also have a high mechanical stability so that we can open new fields of application for our customers. So like I said, there are new applications where standard DLC was not suitable for these applications. We have, of course, because of our partner's enormous cost savings. This is what I said. And our record actually is lifetime enlargement factor of 20. So we have also some other good advantages of our coating. Just let me mention that the roughness is very, very smooth. We have average roughnesses of less than 100 nanometers, and this is quite good for energy efficiency, for example. Now let's take a look on typical available DLC coatings. Here, we looked at the portfolios of some of our competitors from Germany, Switzerland and even China. And what you can see here is the problem of intrinsic stress that is only solved by ANTACON and that problem causes that you have always limitations in maximum film hardness and/or the maximum firm thickness. So what you can see here, the highest amount of hardness on the left side is 50 gigahertz car, and the film thickness is 1 micron. Our competitors also can do hard coatings, but this will cause much smaller film thickness. So you go under 1 micron, which is not suitable for many applications. So as mentioned, we solved the problem of internal stress due to our laser annealing process. And this gives us the opportunity to go up to 70 gigapascal and the film thickness is simply unlimited. Some words about our technology. We use Pulsed Laser Deposition to generate the super hard phase of carbon. The first step is to irradiate a target. This is where our particles are coming from, its rapid of high purity. So using the pulsed lasers, we generate plasma and highly accelerated particles that are going through the substrate. This is absolutely necessary to get a tetrahedral amorphous phase of carbon, in other words, super hard phase. So this is, I think, nothing new to generate particles or to generate coatings. And at this point, we have the problem everyone else has. We have high intrinsic stress in our layers. So while film grows, the layer would peel off at the thickness of 1 micron or even 1.5 micron because of the intrinsic stress. And now something special comes here into the process, this is laser 2. And Laser 2, also an Excimer laser irradiates the growing film. And this leads to complete elimination of the internal stress. And this gives us the opportunity to grow these super hard films in any thickness. Some words about why we use Excimer lasers for PLD and also the annealing process. Here on the left side, you see some parameters of the laser we are using. The most important, in my opinion are pulse energy and the repetition rate. But there are some other advantages that lead us to use PLD for the film growth. So the first is we get really high kinetic energy of the ablated species. And this is, like I mentioned, absolutely necessary to get the super-hot phase of the carbon. We have really high pulse energy, and this allows us to have focused pulse of some square millimeters with nevertheless sufficient laser pulse fluence. And this is good for higher growth rates. Also, the beam profile is very important for us for the laser annealing process, and this is given by these Excimer lasers. In general, if you deposit films using PLD you get quite smooth surfaces, okay, with some particles. But as mentioned, we have average roughness of less than 100 nanometer. This is the 1 point. And the other point is that you have really precise film thickness of growth rate control of your films. So if you calculate what's the deposition rate or the growing film thickness per pulse, you have less than 1 angstrom. So this means we can deposit films with a really exact film thickness. Now let's take a look at the portfolio of ANTACON. We are offering typical job coating. That means our customers deliver their tools and components, we coat them and send them back. What we also do is layer design for special applications, consulting. We have everything in our lab to do thin film analytics. And what we also are offering are customized coating systems also for special applications. That means our customers can get a coating system with our technology, integrated and can use this in their facilities. Now let's take a look at the field of application. As mentioned, we have some positive features of our layers like hardness, mechanical stability, smoothness and even biocompatibility. And this is why we can coat a bunch of tools and components from various industries and because of the biocompatibility, which comes from the high amount of diamonds bonds in our layers, we also can use these layers in food and pharma industry. Here, you can see a use case from stepping and fine cutting. The machine's material was duplex Steel, which is quite hard to machine. On the left side, on the picture, you see the stamping tool, which was coated. One good thing using the PLD process is that you have sharp edges at the beginning of your coating process and the edges will stay exactly in this shape. But this is an additional information. What they have tested here is the performance of the tool in comparison to a well-established coating. And what you can see here in this diagram is that we could increase the tool lifetime by factor of 4.7. Here, we have one example from semiconductor industry, where the absence of internal stress is absolutely important. You might know the tools they use tools like shafts -- wafer shafts and grinders are very precise in the dimensions. And if you coat thin films on them with internal stress, the tools would bend, they bend a little bit, but this is absolutely not suitable for applications in semiconductor industry. So what we have here is a tool lifetime increase due to the hardness of the layer and additionally, the shape of the tool will be exactly the same after the deposition. So the absence of stress here is really obligatory. Here, we have a use case from pharma industries. On the right picture here, you see tablet pressing tools. And here, we have the problem that, of course, here occurs, but main problem here is that the powders are sticking on your tools. So if we coat with our ANTACON coating with a really smooth surface, we get an anti-sticking behavior. And this is really advantageous for this. Looking at the time, I have one last example from automotive industry. And this goes to fuel cell compressors, and there are fast rotating shafts like you can see here on the right side. Here, all of our positive features from our layers come into the game. That means you have these shafts with a really high rotation speed. They are doing more than 100,000 wheels per minute. And here, all things are important. You need mechanical stability because of the fast rotating, you need wheel protection, of course, and you need low friction. And all this is given in this case, so this is really good to have the ANTACON coatings here on these shafts. And I also can say that standard coatings would not stay on these shafts. They would peel off at these high rotation speeds. Okay. If you're interested in more applications or more use cases or maybe if you have an application where our ANTACON coatings might help you, please don't hesitate to contact us. And thank you very much for your attention.

Yes. Welcome back to our next subject, PLD for high-temperature superconducting tapes and scaling to mass production. Today, many companies use PLD to grow the high-quality HTS films, which are required in many applications -- energy-related applications. And I will give you the big picture of HTS production aspects using PLD and also the current production status and also why HTS tapes are pivotal for our future, even on a global scale. So why do we need high-temperature superconductors in the first place? Superconductors are used for a variety of applications, spanning from science, medical to transportation, industrial and energy applications. You can segment them in low field applications -- low magnetic field applications and high magnetic field applications. For example, high-voltage cables, transformers, motors, generators, these are applications which are conducted in low magnetic fields, maybe below 5 Tesla and here, HTS tapes replace basically copper and they can be operated at liquid nitrogen and moving from copper to HTS is a superior technology leap, enabling much more efficient cables or coiled devices with much lower weight and size. If we go to higher magnetic field applications like, for example, MRIs, high-field research magnets for NMRs, for example, or Fusion accelerators, these kind of things, then HTS tapes are to replace the LTS material, LTS, myobium alloys, which are used currently, and they enable magnetic fields which are not possible to achieve with LTS material. So here, they are a technology enabler, and we will see a very prominent example in the next slides. So let's talk about high-temperature, superconductor manufacturing. HTS is a material which is a complex oxide, crystalline ceramic material, brittle material. It contains the elements, atrium, barium, copper and oxygen. So very complex oxide, and it needs to be fabricated in thin films on tape substrates. So HTS-tape manufacturing is a perfect example of PLD large area deposition because -- to give you an order of magnitude, growing a PLD thin film on a, for example, 1 kilometer long tape, which has a 10-centimeter width, this already amounts to a coating area of, in total, 10 square meters. So this is truly a large area PLD deposition. But there's more challenges which is the material is polycrystalline only then it conducts the current. And so the polycrystal need to be biaxially oriented. REBCO stands for rare earth barium copper oxide, that's the blue film shown here in the middle and it's typically 2 to 3 microns thick. So the rare earth is mostly atrium, but it can also be gadolinium or maybe other elements to play around with the properties. There are other layers. So one is, of course, the substrate, some 50 microns in thickness and then some buffer layers, which have chemical -- as chemical barriers, for example, are for texturing, then the REBCO film. And then on top, we have protection layers. So -- but focusing on the REBCO film layer, one can here depict the necessity of polycrystals, they should be completely biaxially oriented that is they are not in or out of plan grain boundaries because if that happens, your current decreases exponentially. There's also more to it so even if you have the biaxial orientation and you manage the large field, there's a favorable inherent defect structure in the HTS material, which helps you to apply it to higher magnetic fields. So I'm not going into the details, there's a nice overview article here on the lower -- given on the lower right section in the slide. But sketching it roughly, depending on the method you use like metal organic depositions or chemical deposition or metal organic chemical vapor deposition or PLD you create a different defect structure. And it happens that the PLD defect structure is most favorable to operating the tapes in high magnetic fields. And we see that this really has an impact on their applicability for, yes, pivotal applications. Also the tapes, HTS tapes have to be cut in many applications, for example, to reduce alternating current losses or simply because they use this [indiscernible] with smaller than the production with. So there is potentially mechanical cutting and laser cutting. And as you may already guess laser cutting is much more precise. And here, we have the Monaco laser, femtosecond laser, which has a very good beam profile, very symmetric beam profile, enough energy and power scaling. So 60 watt is shown here, but we have also, in the meantime, 150 watt available, the pulse with -- shorter pulse with -- helps with quality cutting, so 350 femtoseconds is possible, but that can also be adjusted according to the requirements. So that said, this is rather sketchy. So let's have a glimpse into real-world HTS manufacturing. This is slide, I'm allowed to use from a Faraday Factory Japan, one of the HTS makers there is. And so you see that a lot of process steps are used in a manufacturing fab. So that starts by polishing the substrate adding via sputtering mostly buffer layers, then texturing steps with [indiscernible]. And finally, the PLD is applied for the superconducting layer itself. And then again, certain sputtering protection layers annealing and then the slitting I mentioned. And then again, protection layers and then very important quality control, of course. So a lot of process steps have to be managed and Faraday Factory is very, very good at that, raising the deposition rate, providing process control and scalability. So the example here for the capacity achieved using LEAP film with Excimer lasers for PLD, the upscaling is in full swing. And you see the efforts and the success over the last decade at the Faraday factory company in Japan. So yes, big success and upscaling beyond the kilometer production capacity. To the right here, you see such a real with PLD tape on a stool as it will finally be delivered. Also, next-gen production is in the making, using higher wattage lasers, 600-watt lasers. So this is under development at Faraday. So this will be the next production step to raise production capacity and also lower the costs. So now why all this HTS tape upscaling? The main driver for the demand of HTS tapes, is fusion. And in particular, it's magnetic confinement fusion. I'm not going into the details here, but this is basically toroidal magnet, yes, compressing a donut-shaped plasma in a device called tokamak. There's also different types of device as stellarator. But that is the essence of it. And what happens inside the plasma is deuterium and tritium fusing to helium releasing new tunes and the loads of energy, which ultimately wants to be used for yes, as an energy source. So what do HTS tapes have to do with that? If you see the critical curves in the left part here, so this niobium alloys here, you see they break down when the magnetic fields in which they are being operated race. So they cannot go to a certain critical field and on the way to that, they exponentially lose the current carrying capacity. The YBCO, HTS material. On the contrary, you see is not so much affected by the magnetic field. So you get still good current capacity at very high magnetic fields. So that makes a big difference. That's a game changer for magnetic confinement fusion. And why is that because you can use either size of a tokamak reactor or magnetic field to increase the output. So you can substitute the two and because the LTS goes just to a certain level, which it can be operated certain magnetic field level, it's restricted to high overall sizes of the reactors. If you're now using HTS, it can go up with magnetic field. So at the same output curve, you can use a much higher magnetic field, but much lower size. And so this helps you with the HTS material to bring down the size, the costs and also the project time lines for tokamak reactors. And here, it's also shown for the plasma donut, the plasma volume. So you see the difference in size for LTS which is a big one and HTS-based reactors at the same output level. It's a big step in size reduction. And you can imagine the overall system is even -- it's even a bigger effect. So the fusion industry, in general, is growing, multiple players using HTS tapes, that is a survey from fusion industry association. So there's a lot of dynamics in the fusion market. And today, many companies use PLD to grow the high-quality HTS films, not only Faraday Factory, which are required for fusion magnets. HTS tapes for fusion magnets is, in fact, the largest PLD production application by now. So let me give you final outlook on fusion energy. So yes, what are the implications of HTS. So this would be here the project time for the [indiscernible], for example, which is the biggest LTS reactor. And you see that first deuterium and tritium operation is scheduled for 35 and so the time elapses more and more until you even get the first demo. On the other hand, if you use HTS, you have private companies saying, "Hey, at 2025, we will provide first net-energy reactor and give us to the 30s, and we will be able to put such a reactor to the grid and produce fusion energy for the grid." And now if you give time for upscaling, building more and more reactors, you could also come up with a time line where you scale up fusion reactors and even, yes, can have a scenario where you replace fossil fuels, coal, natural gas by the CO2, yes, free net zero fusion energy. So that is the promise, and that's very exciting and HTS material is at the heart at it. Yes, in the future for HTS tapes, next to fusion, there will be more market opportunities. As I said, high voltage cables, fault current limiters for the grid but also coil-based applications, MRIs, which can be operated without helium, for example, motors, generators, transformers, much smaller, much more efficient and then, of course, all the high field applications. So over time, the economies of scale of producing more and more HTS tapes will drive price and costs down and open also, yes, all these additional markets. So with that, I am at the end, and thanks a lot and see you at the Q&A session.

Yes. Great. Well, thanks for staying with us. Great overview and nice talks. I hope you found the 3 talks informative as well. Again, yes, I saw a lot of comments and questions in the chat already, which is great, and we will come to the Q&A soon. But before I will ask you again to answer another poll question, which is popping up now. So it's about: My PLD thin film growth would most benefit from. Yes. Great. Interesting to see not only so all the questions are great and interesting answers. Thank you. Thank you. Great.

Okay. Great. Yes. Thanks again for your input. And now as we have the speakers on stage. So yes, I see Hagen and Ralph now join our Q&A. As our guest, Hagen, I have a first question out of the chat. So which effects limit the achievable hardness to 70 gigahertz, could you go higher?

Of course, we tried that. But there's, for some reason, a limit. If you increase the laser pulse fluence while growing the film, the kinetic energy goes higher and you get harder coatings. But at some -- at one point, we don't know exactly why the system turns back to the other direction. That means the films will be less hard. So I think the reason is the morphology on the one hand, we deposit at 90 degrees C. So the films are amorphous. And if you have these amorphous films, you always have a composition of diamond bonds and graphitic bonds. And yes, at some ratio, there is a limit, I think. So under special conditions on flat substrate, we got about 80 gigapascal but really only in the lab and under special conditions, flat substrates. So yes, unfortunately, I think this is a physical limit for these films.

Yes. Great answer. And then yes, so 70 is already a great number.

I think so.

So yes, a lot of questions. On the second one, I would have for Ralph now. It's more about PLD setup. So does Coherent also provide components for the optical beam path or entire deposition systems. Ralph?

Yes. I hope my connection is stable and stay stable. That's a good question. Thank you, Oliver. I forgot to mention that in my first talk that we have, of course, all kinds of laser solutions. But we even go a little further as for PLD, we have individual optical components. That is, for example, projection lenses or homogenizers where needed, homogenizers are not so frequently used in PLD. Also attenuators, I should say. So attenuator modules are for seamlessly setting the energy range of the laser. So that's a very handy component or yes, for the beam path and yes, for integrators or scientific customers, which are not so familiar possibly with integrating the laser and the vacuum system, we have also an optical beam path, an entirely optical -- full optical beam path, which has high efficiency. It's rather short in overall length and has a very convenient fluence setting. So this is where we try to make it easier also for people which are maybe using the Excimer laser for the first time.

Okay. So you say optical beam path components, yes, but entire deposition systems we leave it to our customers -- to our OEM customers that they build their complex tools. We just deliver the laser sources and different type of optics. Okay. Great. So well, more questions. So I think that could be for all of us. What deposition rates we are talking about for your different systems and in what area? I think the different systems are related to smaller lasers or larger lasers. But in general, the deposition rates are interesting. So Hagen, can you give us some overview or insight?

Yes. So the deposition rates always depends, of course, on your laser source, the parts energy and repetition rate. and also on the substrate or the material you are ablating. So let's talk about carbon. If we talk to carbon and especially go to deposition processes for factories, for commercial use, it's really important to have higher repetition rates. And the deposition rates using PLD are moderate, let me say, there are other ways to ablate carbon with higher repetition rates. Let me be concrete. If we go to PLD on an area of, let's say, 5 square centimeters we achieved 300 nanometers per minute. This is quite good, but on a limited area. So if we use PLD, we always have to move the substrate or the tool in the particle beam. So there are other large area methods for the pivoting. But we want to have the hardest common layers. We want to have really smooth carbon layers. So there's no other way than using PLD. So I hope this answers the question.

Maybe I can add something here. So you mentioned, Hagen, handling. And of course, this is also time you have to address for the overall tuck time. But for example, superconducting tapes, I could imagine that as you go wheel to wheel, then it's really very say, proportional to the repetition rate because you do not have like handling like a wafer, for example, or a 3-dimensional path. So here, I guess, the influence of the repetition rate is even more direct.

We see that, too. So the more repetition rates, the more throughput you have, of course, yes.

Okay. Yes, great. I thought that answers a little bit the -- not in detail the deposition rate, but yes, it's -- if you go to more complex coatings or layers, PLD is the process of choice. And yes, of course, it's great. So I have a short fourth question. Is there any specific target preparation procedure to ensure it's cleanness? Can somebody of you or both or somebody answer this?

It depends on what you are ablating. We use carbon targets, so there's no oxidation and we simply keep our targets clean, that's all. So if you go to metal deposition, you always have oxide films on your targets. And there, I think, ion beam cleaning or something like that would be suitable or maybe you go over your and that you are not depositing on your substrate and letting the oxygen go and then the next step putting your substrate over it and then deposition. So oxides are a problem on targets, I think.

I think. Okay. So I think we have chance for one or two more questions. So the first was, are there any solid state laser systems that can use other than Excimer. I think I can give a first answer that whatever I know is that the Pulsed Laser Deposition is defined by energy of the laser to create a plum or larger area ablation. And so far, I think in the UV, we haven't seen any powerful or energy-wise laser that can achieve the same energy like an Excimer laser. I don't know if you want to add something, Ralph, Hagen?

Yes. I think that depends also sometimes on the material, for example, if you have metals, which you want to deposit and it's most likely not an Excimer laser. It would be like a femtosecond laser. So we see other lasers being used not in the fab, towards the fab, I must say, because then exactly what you said in UV power pulsed energy plus repetition rate, and that's hard to get from tripled or even quadrupled Nd:YAG lasers. Okay. So it depends very much on the material.

Yes. Short comment from you, Hagen?

Yes. I'm smiling. We have tested different types of lasers. We've done picosecond lasers. We've done femtosecond lasers. And of course, you can do PLD. But in my opinion, it's all about pulse energy because if you want to reach a certain laser for fluence to get your pulse to get updated, of course, you can take let me say, picosecond lasers, do a really, really small, focused spots, and then you achieve the laser pulse fluence and then you can ablate and do PLD. But the growth rate will be ridiculous. So if we go and use these Excimer lasers with a really high pulse energy of 1 Joule and more, we have focused spot sizes of some square millimeters. So this is what gives you ablation rate, yes.

Okay. So one last question for both of you. We have a lot of researchers also in the call today. So which materials markets or segment would you expect to move next from the lab to the fab, so what will be the next industrial application beside HTS and carbon diamond coatings. What do you think one short comment, Hagen.

Maybe I can start. So what I see is a lot of project money is flowing into energy applications. Thin film batteries, for example, micro batteries or thin film solid oxide fuel cells where you can make these complex materials for electrolytes, solid electrolytes, in very thin version. So this is surely something and possibly also TCOs for organic solar cells or maybe micro displays. So this is where I see chances for PLD also to grow towards the lab.

Yes. Hagen?

My short answer would be nanocomposites and all the fields of application yes.

Okay. Great. Yes, I think. Yes, exciting. So looking to the time, now we're coming to the end. We have no more time for further questions. We will collect all of them and come back to you offline later directly. So thank you for posting them. A lot of questions I see now. And with this, I think the Coherent team and our guest speaker, would like to thank you for joining us today. It looks like to me also that PLD is of high interest for thin film deposition, both in lab and fab environments. Of course, we, as Coherent, we will continue to support you with our laser technologies, either your R&D work in the lab or your production scaling in the fab. This concludes today's session. We hope to see you at our next Amplify event. Thank you. Thank you, Hagen. Thank you, Ralph.

Thanks.

Thank you.