Physics Commons^™

Modeling Free-Carrier Absorption And Avalanching By Ultrashort Laser Pulses, Jeremy Gulley

Jeremy R. Gulley

In the past decade it was demonstrated experimentally that negatively-chirped laser pulses can lower the surface LIDT for wide band-gap materials by decreasing the number of photons required for photoionization on the leading edge of the pulse. Similarly, simulations have shown that positively-chirped pulses resulting from selffocusing and self-phase modulation in bulk dielectrics can alter the onset of laser-induced material modifications by increasing the number of photons required for photoionization on the leading edge of the pulse. However, the role of multi-chromatic effects in free-carrier absorption and avalanching has yet to be addressed. In this work a frequency-selective model of …