Expansion of an ablation plume in a buffer gas and cluster synthesis

The mixed propagation model is introduced to describe the expansion through a buffer gas of the plasma produced by pulsed-laser ablation. After testing the model against the results of representative experiments, the deduced expansion parameter values are used to model the growth of clusters that are nucleated in the plume. For plumes of silicon and tungsten propagating in helium as well as of tantalum propagating in oxygen cluster size is evaluated and compared (silicon; tungsten) with experimental data.