NANOSECOND MICROSTRUCTURING OF Nd3+ DOPED LASER CRYSTALS: COMBINED LIBS AND MICRO-LUMINESCENCE INVESTIGATIONS.

A. RÓDENAS; D. JAQUE; F. C. ALVIRA; G. A. TORCHIA

Tenerife, España

Congreso; 9th International Conference on Laser Ablation; 2007

CSIC, España

Ultrashort pulse laser micromodification of transparent crystals has been recently demonstrated to be an efficient technique for creating a wide variety of photonic devices. Among all its fields of applications the photonic and optoelectronics area is of special relevance due to the increasing demand for new optical micrometer sized devices. A variety of applications based on this technique have been so demonstrated in different materials, this including optical waveguides, integrated diffractive elements, photonic band-gap structures and binary data storage elements. Although extensive work has been done in this direction the fundamental mechanisms underlying the nanosecond laser ablation regime are not yet fully understood. In order to clarify this we have performed a combined analysis by means of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), ablation depth characterization and micro-luminescence analysis of the surrounding modified area to ablation versus incident fluence. Significant phenomena such as fluence threshold between different ablation regimes, defect creation, amorphization and shock wave propagation are investigated versus laser fluence for different laser crystals. Also the influence of laser ion doping has been studied.