Experimental study on double-pulse laser ablation of steel upon multiple parallel-polarized ultrashort-pulse irradiations

In this paper, double-pulse laser processing is experimentally studied with the aim to explore the influence of ultrashort pulses with very short time intervals on ablation efficiency and quality. For this, sequences of 50 double pulses of varied energy and inter-pulse delay, as adjusted between 400 fs and 18 ns by splitting the laser beam into two optical paths of different length, were irradiated to technical-grade stainless steel. The depth and the volume of the craters produced were measured in order to evaluate the efficiency of the ablation process; the crater quality was analyzed by SEM micrographs. The results obtained were compared with craters produced with sequences of 50 single pulses and energies equal to the double pulse. It is demonstrated that double-pulse processing cannot exceed the ablation efficiency of single pulses of optimal fluence, but the ablation crater surface formed smoother if inter-pulse delay was in the range between 10 ns and 18 ns. In addition, the influence of pulse duration and energy distribution between the individual pulses of the double pulse on ablation was studied. For very short inter-pulse delay, no significant effect of energy variation within the double pulse on removal rate was found, indicating that the double pulse acts as a big single pulse of equal energy. Further, the higher removal efficiency was achieved when double-pulse processing using femtosecond pulses instead of picosecond pulses.