Abstract
Basic studies on ultrafast laser ablation processes are important for expanding their utility. In particular, understanding the ablated morphology in relation to the incident pulse is critical for micromachining, and an important benchmark for simulations. However, current morphological analyses rely on vast simplifications of experimental conditions, such as a singular fluence value to reduce a unique beam profile, or the maximum crater depth or diameter to describe the ablated morphology. Here, we develop a morphology analysis method in which we take the full two-dimensional information of both the input beam profile and the ablated morphology, and spatially correlate the two without data reduction. We show, using sapphire as a benchmark material, that this serves as a robust way to extract well-studied values and dependencies, such as the ablation threshold, and also as a way to probe the spatial independence of the process. We anticipate that our findings will modernize current study techniques to meet the demand for increased, high-quality data such as that required for artificial intelligence-based analysis.
Highlights
Basic studies on ultrafast laser ablation processes are important for expanding their utility
A central problem when standardizing morphology analysis is compensating the effect of different irradiation beam profiles
The morphology is approximated by a similar scalar value, with representative values in the form of the crater depth or diameter used in lieu of a more complicated height profile
Summary
Basic studies on ultrafast laser ablation processes are important for expanding their utility. The problem of laser-induced breakdown is a difficult problem in physics itself, and still under vigorous investigation[6,7,8], with novel phenomena still being reported[9,10] This situation is apparent in the fact that the description of seemingly fundamental dependencies, such as understanding the ablated hole depths in relation to the incident laser fluence, is still a difficult task[11,12,13]. Morphological data is of qualitative importance in cataloging the results of laser ablation, and for quantified data, where results can readily be compared to results of numerical models It remains that the vast number of parameters available makes a comprehensive and standardized study on morphology difficult, where the combinations of possible irradiation schemes complicate most analyses. Typical morphological data in the literature consist of such data documenting the dependencies of such representative values in terms of the peak fluence
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