Importance of layer thermal conductivity on the sharpness of patterns produced by laser interference

•Temperature profile matches laser intensity profile in poor thermally conducting layers.•Patterns produced in poor thermally conducting layers have sharp interfaces.•Lateral heat flow smears the temperature profile in thermally conducting layers.•Both liquid and solid state dewetting occurs upon patterning thermally conducting layers.•The thermal conductivity of layers limits the minimum period achievable. In this work, we compare patterns produced in Ag layers having similar thickness in the range 8.3–10.8nm but having different initial nanostructure, i.e. behaving either as discontinuous or continuous layers and thus having very different thermal conductivities. The patterns are produced by exposing a phase mask to an excimer laser operating at 193nm and using a projection optics that leads to similar fringed patterns with periods in the range 6.3–6.7μm. The layer breaks up into isolated NPs due to laser induced melting at the regions around the intensity maxima sites. The resulting fringes have sharp interfaces in the case of discontinuous layers while a variety of regions across the pattern with no sharp interfaces are produced in the case of continuous layers. The results show that while the temperature distribution across the pattern matches almost perfectly the laser beam intensity profile for the former case, it becomes smeared due to lateral heat flow for the latter case. These results provide evidences for significant heating at the intensity minima sites that lead to solid-state dewetting and will eventually limit the minimum period achievable in the case of continuous metal layers or thermally conducting layers.