Astigmatism and spherical aberrations as main causes for degradation of ultrafast laser-induced cavitation in water

Abstract

The generation of cavitation bubbles in water by focused laser pulses has been thoroughly studied, particularly due to the wide range of applications in biomedical fields, in particular for ophthalmic laser surgery. The presence of optical aberrations in any optical system deteriorates the precision of light focusing and may reduce the laser interaction efficiency in transparent media. In this paper, we analyze the influence of several controlled optical geometrical aberrations in the formation and dynamics of cavitation bubbles in water caused by laser-induced optical breakdown using femtosecond laser pulses. The maximum cavitation bubble diameter reduces with increasing aberrations, showing a drop of the energy coupling efficiency, ultimately leading to the absence of cavitation bubble. The study reveals that the secondary astigmatism and spherical aberrations degrade more rapidly the beam concentration than the other aberrations studied here (namely astigmatism first and second, coma, spherical and trefoil). The cavitation energy threshold becomes equally increased. This observation relates very well to numerical simulations evaluating the laser fluence at and around the focusing plane in the presence of aberrations. These results open the door to more controlled ultrafast laser assisted surgeries and processing in transparent media.