熔石英表面热致应力对激光损伤行为影响的研究

Effect of thermal stresses on fused silica surface on the laser induced damage

为了研究热致应力对光学元件损伤特性的影响,通过实验测试退火处理消除热应力和未消热应力石英基片的激光损伤特性,研究了热致应力对石英元件初始损伤阈值、损伤增长阈值以及损伤增长规律的影响.结果表明,热致应力对熔石英光学元件的初始损伤阈值有影响,初始损伤阈值随着热致应力增大而降低;热致应力会加剧激光引发的损伤增长,相同的激光通量下,表面应力越大的区域拥有越高的损伤增长因子,但损伤增长仍遵从指数增长规律.热致应力对损伤增长阈值没有明显的影响.本文的研究将为CO2激光预处理工艺能否被应用于大口径光学元件提供一个必要的技术参考.

To study the effect of the thermal stresses on the optics, experiment is performed to measure the damage threshold of the two fused silica samples with one annealed to eliminate thermal stresses while the other not. The measurement includes the effects of the thermal stresses on the initial damage threshold of the fused silica, the damage growth threshold, and the damage growth laws. The results show that the damage threshold decreases as the thermal stresses increase, and the damage induced by the laser is accelerated by the thermal stresses. For the same laser intensity, the damage growth factor is higher for the area with higher thermal stresses, but the damage growth still obeys the exponential increase rule and no obvious effect of the thermal stresses is found on the damage growth threshold. The study here will determine to some extent whether the technology of the CO2 laser pretreatment can be applied to the large-aperture optics or not.