**1. Introduction**

The wide application of thin films in newest technologies has revealed the need of developing simple methods of obtaining large‐area thin films. One of these methods is provided by pulsed laser deposition (PLD). It equally provides high speed of deposition, correspondence of the film composition to that of the target, and possibilities to vary the gas pressure in the deposition chamber in a wide range.

PLD started developing rapidly after the discovery of high‐temperature superconductivity. Scientists needed samples of new multicomponent materials, superior in their characteristic to the ceramic ones, for identification of their physical properties and disclosure of high‐ temperature superconductivity mechanism. For solution of these issues, the Laboratory of High‐Temperature Superconductivity was founded in the Institute for Physical Research NAS of Armenia in September 1987. Here, we present the research conducted in this laboratory to

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

develop new approaches and solutions for the preparation of large‐area homogeneous in composition and thickness thin films and coatings of complex compounds. PLD turned out to be a very convenient tool to obtain thin films of high‐temperature superconductors.

PLD is used to grow thin films of metals, oxides, polymers, biocompatible materials, and so on. It allows the fabrication of ultra‐thin epitaxial single‐crystalline, polycrystalline and amorphous films, heterostructures and nanocrystalline coatings [1, 2]. PLD is simple in application and, therefore, is widely used in research laboratories. However, it is also prom‐ ising for various commercial applications, in particular, growth of large‐area films. Films of uniform thickness on large‐diameter substrates are necessary for many applications in microelectronics, optical industry, and other modern technologies.

Wide use of PLD in the growth of large‐area films is impeded by the following circumstance: the angular distribution of the mass‐transfer rate in the plasma plume formed by laser radiation is nonuniform. Therefore, using conventional laser deposition, one cannot obtain films of uniform thickness on substrates larger than 10 mm in diameter. In this chapter, we describe some main solutions to this problem and propose a new technique for depositing thin films of uniform thickness on large‐area substrates the size of which is limited by the deposition chamber dimensions only.

All versions of PLD of large‐area films are based on the fact that the angular distribution of the mass‐transfer rate in a plasma plume is set by the function *F*(*θ*) = *A*cosm *θ* [1], where *θ* is the angle of deviation from the perpendicular to the target plane. The plasma plume axis, that is, the direction in which the mass‐transfer rate is maximal, is perpendicular to the target surface in a wide range of variation in the angle of incidence of laser beam on the target. Knowing the angular distribution of the mass‐transfer rate of the material evaporated from the target, one can arrange the mutual position and motion of the target and substrate to provide identical amount of evaporated material per substrate unit area over the substrate surface and thus grow films uniform in thickness.
