An Alternate Treatment of the Vapor-Plasma Transition

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of predicting p(I), the variation of surface ablation pressure vs. incident pulsed laser intensity I, from the onset of ablation through the transition to its mediation by laser-induced plasma in vacuum. Despite its simplicity, the recently published approach of Sinko and Phipps [1] to this problem describes momentum coupling for many laser-target interactions quite well, for one material at a single wavelength where the ablation fluence threshold is clearly defined. Alternatively, if vapor pressure vs. temperature data p(T) is available for a material, e.g., using the SESAME tables, a different model can be used. In addition to the p(T) data, this model only requires knowledge of basic parameters for the material, such as specific heat, thermal conductivity, optical absorptivity, atomic weight, and its ionization state energies and their partition functions. Since all these parameters, except for optical absorptivity, are independent of laser wavelength, it is possib...