Optical emission and energy disposal characterization of the laser ablation process of CaF2, BaF2, and NaCl at 1064 nm

Abstract

A method to simultaneously measure the fraction of incident energy spent as absorbed, scattered, and consumed energy by the plasma generated in the ablation process is presented. The results obtained allowed to make an energy balance in the ablation process of halogenated earth alkaline metal crystals (NaCl, BaF2, and CaF2) and to relate the nature of the crystal structure to the absorbed energy. The latter could be determined by monitoring the magnitude of the breakdown induced by the discharge between the plates of a capacitor. Simultaneously, time resolved optical emission spectroscopy was used to analyze the ion emission intensity and as a function of the energy absorbed by the sample. This plot shows the usual sigmoid behavior for the ablation process with the three typical regions, corresponding to the vaporization, screening, and ablation regimes. A heuristic equation has been used to analyze this process in terms of the nature of the crystal structure. From this equation the critical absorbed energy for each of the studied samples could also be determined.