Oscar Versolato

Oscar Versolato received his PhD in 2011 from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, for work on laser spectroscopy on trapped, short-lived radium ions. He did postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck-Institute für Kernphysik in Heidelberg, Germany, on spectroscopy and sympathetic laser cooling of highly charged ions (with PTB Braunschweig, DE), and molecular ions (with Aarhus University, DK). He has been working on Source research at ARCNL starting 2014 and since 2019 he is a tenured group leader of the EUV Plasma Processes group at the Advanced Research Center for Nanolithography (ARCNL) in Amsterdam and an Full Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His present research interests include plasma sources of extreme ultraviolet radiation, droplet deformation and fragmentation after laser pulse impact, physics of highly charged ions, and spectroscopy. He was awarded the 2016 NWO Vidi research grant, as well as the 2018 ERC Starting and 2022 ERC Consolidator grant. He is the head of the Source Department at ARCNL, and is part of the management teams at ARCNL and at Vrije Universiteit.

Research description

Our group studies the physics of EUV-light-generating laser-produced plasma. We this purpose we use a tin microdroplet generator to provide targets for our high-energy pulsed solid-state laser systems which generate a hot and very dense plasma from them. We study this plasma at the aggregate and the fundamental level: physics of liquids and gases, and the constituent electrons, atoms, and ions.