On the Pulsed Laser Ablation of Metals and Semiconductors

A comparison of effects across disparate experimental regimes through the study of pulsed laser ablation over several orders of magnitude in pulse duration, fluence, and material properties.

Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio

Laser ablation is an incredibly active field, including research in fundamental physics (e.g. non-equilibrium thermodynamics), industrial (e.g. laser peening) and medical (e.g. laser dentistry) applications, and even security and defense applications (e.g. chemical detection and laser lethality). Over such a broad range of applications with varying degrees of precision required, it is often difficult to find unifying trends that allow researchers and practitioners to understand and compare effects across disparate physical regimes. Furthermore, differences in research goals, experimental apparatus, and theoretical approaches create barriers to establishing a broad physical intuition capable of translating results from study to study.

To that end, the fundamental goal of this research is to build from a broad set of experimental and theoretical data to a narrower set of scaling relations, heuristics, and trends that provide a roadmap for understanding laser ablation across relevant regimes. Specifically, the objective is to quantify the effects of ablation including crater morphology, ablation efficiency, and plume spectral emissions across metals and semiconductors using pulse durations spanning picoseconds to microseconds and fluences from ones to thousands of J/cm².