<title>Development of high damage threshold optics for petawatt-class short-pulse lasers</title>

Abstract

The authors report laser-induced damage threshold measurements on pure and multilayer dielectrics and gold-coated optics at 1053 and 526 nm for pulse durations, {tau}, ranging from 140 fs to 1 ns. Damage thresholds of gold coatings are limited to 500 mJ/cm{sup 2} in the subpicosecond range for 1053-nm pulses. In dielectrics, qualitative differences in the morphology of damage and a departure from the diffusion-dominated {tau}1/2 scaling indicate that damage results from plasma formation and ablation for {tau}{le}10 ps and from conventional melting and boiling for {tau}>50 ps. A theoretical model based on electron production via multiphoton ionization, Joule heating, and collisional (avalanche) ionization is in quantitative agreement with both the pulsewidth and wavelength scaling of experimental results.