Laser-induced damage threshold in HfO_2/SiO_2 multilayer films irradiated by β-ray

Post-processing can effectively improve the resistance to laser damage in multilayer films used in a high power laser system. In this work, HfO_2/SiO_2 multilayer films are prepared by e-beam evaporation and then β-ray irradiation is employed as the post-processing method. The particle irradiation affects the laser induced damage threshold(LIDT),which includes defects, surface roughness, packing density and residual stress. The residual stress that is relaxed during irradiation changes from compressive stress into tensile stress. Our results indicate that appropriate tensile stress can improve LIDT remarkably. In view of the fact that LIDT rises from 8 J/cm^2 to 12 J/cm^2, i.e., 50% increase, after the film has been irradiated by 2.2×10^(13)/cm^2 β-ray, the particle irradiation can be used as a controllable and desirable postprocessing method to improve the resistance to laser induced damage.

The compatibly large nonlinear optical effect and high laser-induced damage threshold in a thiophosphate CsInP_(2)S_(7)constructed with[P_(2)S_(7)]^(4-)and[InS_(6)]^(9-)

It is challenging to cooperatively improve the nonlinear optical(NLO)efficiency and the laser-induced damage threshold(LIDT).This work reports a novel IR NLO materials CsInP_(2)S_(7)(CIPS)designed by combination the strategies of alkali metals substitution and microscopic NLO units PS4 introduction based on AgGaS_(2).CIPS was composed of strongly distorted[InS_(6)]^(9-)octahedra and[P_(2)S_(7)]4-dimers constructed by corner-sharing[PS_(4)]^(3-),which increase the NLO efficiency and decrease thermal expansion anisotropy simultaneously.Compared with AgGaS_(2),CIPS exhibited strong phase matchable NLO response ca.1.1×AGS@2.1μm,high LIDT ca.20.8×AgGaS_(2),and IR transparency up to 15.3μm.Structural analysis and theoretical investigation confirmed that large SHG effect and ultrahigh LIDT of CIPS originated from the synergistic contribution of[InS_(6)]^(9-)octahedra and[P_(2)S_(7)]4-dimers.These results indicate that CIPS is a promising NLO candidate in the mid-IR region,and this study provides a new approach for developing potential NLO-LIDT compatible materials.

Annealing Effects on Structural,Optical Properties and Laser-Induced Damage Threshold of MgF2 Thin Films

The chemical structures, optical properties and laser-induced damage thresholds of magnesium fluoride films annealed at different temperatures were investigated. The results showed that the stoichiometry of MgF2 film changed a little with the increase in annealing temperature. Analysis of the optical properties indicated that excellent antireflection behavior of the film in the range of 200-400 nm can be obtained by the samples coated with MgF2 film. The refractive index increased and the extinction coefficient decreased with increasing annealing temperature. Compared with the asdeposited films, the laser-induced damage threshold was improved after annealing process and decreased with the increase in annealing temperature, which was probably due to the denser film and more absorption centers under higher annealing temperature.

A nodule dome removal strategy to improve the laser-induced damage threshold of coatings

Various coatings in high-power laser facilities suffer from laser damage due to nodule defects.We propose a nodule dome removal(NDR)strategy to eliminate unwanted localized electric-field(E-field)enhancement caused by nodule defects,thereby improving the laser-induced damage threshold(LIDT)of laser coatings.It is theoretically demonstrated that the proposed NDR strategy can reduce the localized E-field enhancement of nodules in mirror coatings,polarizer coatings and beam splitter coatings.An ultraviolet(UV)mirror coating is experimentally demonstrated using the NDR strategy.The LIDT is improved to about 1.9 and 2.2 times for the UV mirror coating without artificial nodules and the UV mirror coating with artificial nodule seeds with a diameter of 1000 nm,respectively.The NDR strategy,applicable to coatings prepared by different deposition methods,improves the LIDT of laser coating without affecting other properties,such as the spectrum,stress and surface roughness,indicating its broad applicability in high-LIDT laser coatings.

Laser-induced damage threshold in n-on-1 regime of Ta_2O_5 films at 532,800,and 1064 nm

Ta205 films were prepared with conventional electron beam evaporation and annealed in 02 at 673 K for 12 h. Laser-induced damage thresholds （LIDTs） of the films were performed at 532 and 1064 nm in 1-on-1 regime firstly, and then were performed at 532, 800, and 1064 nm in n-on-1 regime, respectively. The results showed that the LIDTs in n-on-1 regime were higher than that in 1-on-1 regime at 532 and 1064 nm. In addition, in n-on-1 regime, the LIDT increased with the increase of wavelength. Furthermore, both the optical property and LIDT of Ta205 films were influenced by annealing in 02.

Laser-induced damage thresholds of ultrathin targets and their constraint on laser contrast in laser-driven ion acceleration experiments

Single-shot laser-induced damage threshold(LIDT)measurements of multi-type free-standing ultrathin foils were performed in a vacuum environment for 800 nm laser pulses with durationsτranging from 50 fs to 200 ps.The results show that the laser damage threshold fluences(DTFs)of the ultrathin foils are significantly lower than those of corresponding bulk materials.Wide band gap dielectric targets such as SiN and formvar have larger DTFs than semiconductive and conductive targets by 1–3 orders of magnitude depending on the pulse duration.The damage mechanisms for different types of targets are studied.Based on the measurement,the constrain of the LIDTs on the laser contrast is discussed.

Femtosecond laser-induced damage threshold in snow micro-structured targets

Enhanced acceleration of protons to high energy by relatively modest high power ultra-short laser pulses, interacting with snow micro-structured targets was recently proposed. A notably increased proton energy was attributed to a combination of several mechanisms such as localized enhancement of the laser field intensity near the tip of 1 μm size whisker and increase in the hot electron concentration near the tip. Moreover, the use of mass-limited target prevents undesirable spread of absorbed laser energy out of the interaction zone. With increasing laser intensity a Coulomb explosion of the positively charged whisker will occur. All these mechanisms are functions of the local density profile and strongly depend on the laser pre-pulse structure. To clarify the effect of the pre-pulse on the state of the snow micro-structured target at the time of interaction with the main pulse, we measured the optical damage threshold(ODT) of the snow targets. ODT of 0.4 J/cm^2 was measured by irradiating snow micro-structured targets with 50 fs duration pulses of Ti:Sapphire laser.

Hexagonal boron nitride nanosheets incorporated antireflective silica coating with enhanced laser-induced damage threshold

Boron nitride(BN) nanosheets incorporated silica antireflective(AR) coating was successfully prepared on fused silica substrate to improve the antilaser-damage ability of transmissive optics used in high-power laser systems. The BN nanosheets were obtained by urea assisted solid exfoliation, and then incorporated into basic-catalyzed silica sols without any further treatment. The transmission electron microscope(TEM) images indicated that the BN nanosheets generally consisted of 2–10 layers. The antireflective BN/SiO_2 coating exhibited excellent transmittance as high as 99.89% at351 nm wavelength on fused silica substrate. The thermal conductivity 0.135 W · m^(-1)· K^(-1) of the BN/SiO_2 coating with 10% BN addition was about 23% higher than 0.11 W · m^(-1)· K^(-1) of the pure SiO_2 AR coating. The laser-induced damage threshold(LIDT) of that BN/SiO_2 coating is also 23.1% higher than that of pure SiO_2 AR coating. This research provides a potential application of BN/SiO_2 coatings in high-power laser systems.

Laser-induced damage on large-aperture fused silica gratings

Two sets of laser-damage experiments on large-aperture fused silica optics have been carried out in a high-power laser facility. Severe damage has been found on the grating which presented dense craters on the front surface. This phenomenon is quite different from other fused silica optics, which are damaged on the rear surface. The damage possibility due to the redeposition layer was ruled out by acid-etching the grating＇s front surface. The remarkable stimulated Brillouin scattering （SBS） effect was observed in grating and the reason for the front surface damage is thought to be the backward SBS.

Characteristics of Laser-Induced Surface and Bulk Damage of Large-Aperture Deuterated Potassium Dihydrogen Phosphate at 351 nm

Deuterated potassium dihydrogen phosphate damage performance at 351 nm is studied on a large-aperture laser system. Bulk and rear-surface damage are initiated under the 3ω fluences of 6.T J/cm2 and 33/cm2, and show different growth characteristics under multiple laser irradiations with the fluence of 6 J/cm2. The size and number of bulk damage keep unchanged once initiated. However, surface damage size also does not grow, while surface damage number increases linearly with laser shots. Different damage thresholds and growth behaviors suggest different formations of bulk and surface damage precursors. The cause of surface damage is supposed to be near-surface absorbing particles buried under the sol-gel coating.

Subsurface defect characterization and laser-induced damage performance of fused silica optics polished with colloidal silica and ceria

This paper mainly focuses on the influence of colloidal silica polishing on the damage performance of fused silica optics. In this paper, nanometer sized colloidal silica and micron sized ceria are used to polish fused silica optics. The colloidal silica polished samples and ceria polished samples exhibit that the root-mean-squared （RMS） average surface roughness values are 0.7 nm and 1.0 rim, respectively. The subsurface defects and damage performance of the polished optics are analyzed and discussed. It is revealed that colloidal silica polishing will introduce much fewer absorptive con- taminant elements and subsurface damages especially no trailing indentation fracture. The 355-nm laser damage test reveals that each of the fused silica samples polished with colloidal silica has a much higher damage threshold and lower damage density than ceria polished samples. Colloidal silica polishing is potential in manufacturing high power laser optics.

Microstructure and 355 nm Laser-Induced Damage Characteristics of Al₂O₃Films Irradiated with Oxygen Plasma under Different Energy

Al2O3 films were prepared using electron beam evaporation at room temperature. The samples were irradiated with oxygen plasma under different energy. The variations in average surface defect density and root mean square (RMS) surface roughness were characterized using an optical microscope and an atomic force microscope. Surface average defect density increased after plasma treatment. The RMS surface roughness of the samples decreased from 1.92 nm to 1.26 nm because of surface atom restructuring after oxygen plasma conditioning. A 355 nm laser-induced damage experiment indicated that the as-grown sample with the lowest defect density exhibited a higher laser-induced damage threshold (1.12 J/cm2) than the other treated samples. Laser-induced damage images revealed that defect is one of the key factors that affect laser-induced damage on Al2O3 films.

Correlation of polishing-induced shallow subsurface damages with laser-induced gray haze damages in fused silica optics

Laser-induced damage in fused silica optics greatly restricts the performances of laser facilities. Gray haze damage,which is always initiated on ceria polished optics, is one of the most important damage morphologies in fused silica optics.In this paper, the laser-induced gray haze damages of four fused silica samples polished with CeO2, Al2O3, ZrO2, and colloidal silica slurries are investigated. Four samples all present gray haze damages with much different damage densities.Then, the polishing-induced contaminant and subsurface damages in four samples are analyzed. The results reveal that the gray haze damages could be initiated on the samples without Ce contaminant and are inclined to show a tight correlation with the shallow subsurface damages.

The effect of laser beam size on laser-induced damage performance

The influence of laser beam size on laser-induced damage performance, especially damage probability and the laser-induced damage threshold （LIDT）, is investigated. It is found that damage probability is dependent on beam size when various damage precursors with different potential behaviors are involved. This causes the damage probability and the LIDT to be different between cases under a large-apertnre beam and a small-aperture beam. Moreover, the fluenee fluctuation of the large-aperture laser beam brings out hot spots, which move randomly across the beam from shot to shot. Thus this leads the most probable maximum fluenee after many shots at any location on the optical component to be several times the average beam fluence, These two effects result in the difference in the damage performance of the optical component between the cases under a large-aperture and small-aperture laser.

Laser-induced Damage of 355 nm High-reflective Mirror Caused by Nanoscale Defect

Al2O3/SiO2 multilayer high-reflective（HR） mirrors at 355 nm were prepared by electron beam evaporation, and post-irradiated with Ar/O mixture plasma. The surface defect density, reflective spectra, and laser-induced damage characteristics were measured using optical microscopy, spectrophotometry, a damage testing system, and scanning electron microscopy（SEM）, respectively. The results indicated that moderate-time of irradiation enhanced the laser-induced damage threshold（LIDT） of the mirror, but prolonged irradiation produced surface defects, resulting in LIDT degradation. LIDT of the mirrors initially increased and subsequently decreased with the plasma processing time. SEM damage morphologies of the mirrors revealed that nanoscale absorbing defects in sub-layers was one of the key factors limiting the improvement of LIDT in 355 nm HR mirror.

Analysis of the damage threshold of the GaAs pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor induced by the electromagnetic pulse

An electromagnetic pulse（EMP）-induced damage model based on the internal damage mechanism of the Ga As pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor（PHEMT） is established in this paper. With this model, the relationships among the damage power, damage energy, pulse width and signal amplitude are investigated. Simulation results show that the pulse width index from the damage power formula obtained here is higher than that from the empirical formula due to the hotspot transferring in the damage process of the device. It is observed that the damage energy is not a constant, which decreases with the signal amplitude increasing, and then changes little when the signal amplitude reaches up to a certain level.

High laser damage threshold coatings and damage testing technology

The laser-induced damage threshold(LIDT) of optical coating is a limited factor for development of a high peak power laser. The automatic damage testing facility was built to determine the LIDT of optics at 1 064 nm and 355 nm.. The cleanning and processing procedure of the substrate and coating technique were improved, and the damage resistance of high-reflective coating at 1 064 nm was increased.

Improvement of laser damage thresholds of fused silica by ultrasonic-assisted hydrofluoric acid etching

Polished fused silica samples were etched for different durations by using hydrofluoric（HF） acid solution with HF concentrations in an ultrasonic field. Surface and subsurface polishing residues and molecular structure parameters before and after the etching process were characterized by using a fluorescence microscope and infrared（IR） spectrometer, respectively. The laser induced damage thresholds（LIDTs） of the samples were measured by using pulsed nanosecond laser with wavelength of 355 nm. The results showed that surface and subsurface polishing residues can be effectively reduced by the acid etching process, and the LIDTs of fused silica are significantly improved. The etching effects increased with the increase of the HF concentration from 5 wt.% to 40 wt.%. The amount of polishing residues decreased with the increase of the etching duration and then kept stable. Simultaneously, with the increase of the etching time, the mechanical strength and molecular structure were improved.

Study on the critical stress threshold of weakly cemented sandstone damage based on the renormalization group method

During the microstructural analysis of weakly cemented sandstone,the granule components and ductile structural parts of the sandstone are typically generalized.Considering the contact between granules in the microstructure of weakly cemented sandstone,three basic units can be determined:regular tetrahedra,regular hexahedra,and regular octahedra.Renormalization group models with granule-and pore-centered weakly cemented sandstone were established,and,according to the renormalization group transformation rule,the critical stress threshold of damage was calculated.The results show that the renormalization model using regular octahedra as the basic units has the highest critical stress threshold.The threshold obtained by iterative calculations of the granule-centered model is smaller than that obtained by the pore-centered model.The granule-centered calculation provides the lower limit(18.12%),and the pore-centered model provides the upper limit(36.36%).Within this range,the weakly cemented sandstone is in a phase-like critical state.That is,the state of granule aggregation transforms from continuous to discrete.In the relative stress range of 18.12%-36.36%,the weakly cemented sandstone exhibits an increased proportion of high-frequency signals(by 83.3%)and a decreased proportion of low-frequency signals(by 23.6%).The renormalization calculation results for weakly cemented sandstone explain the high-low frequency conversion of acoustic emission signals during loading.The research reported in this paper has important significance for elucidating the damage mechanism of weakly cemented sandstone.

Non-blind super-resolution reconstruction for laser-induced damage dark-field imaging of optical elements

The laser-induced damage detection images used in high-power laser facilities have a dark background,few textures with sparse and small-sized damage sites,and slight degradation caused by slight defocus and optical diffraction,which make the image superresolution(SR)reconstruction challenging.We propose a non-blind SR reconstruction method by using an exquisite mixing of high-,intermediate-,and low-frequency information at each stage of pixel reconstruction based on UNet.We simplify the channel attention mechanism and activation function to focus on the useful channels and keep the global information in the features.We pay more attention on the damage area in the loss function of our end-toend deep neural network.For constructing a high-low resolution image pairs data set,we precisely measure the point spread function(PSF)of a low-resolution imaging system by using a Bernoulli calibration pattern;the influence of different distance and lateral position on PSFs is also considered.A high-resolution camera is used to acquire the ground-truth images,which is used to create a low-resolution image pairs data set by convolving with the measured PSFs.Trained on the data set,our network has achieved better results,which proves the effectiveness of our method.