Dissection of multipulse laser damage with time resolved digital holography

Often the limiting factor of modern high intensity light systems is optical damage threshold of the various components used. This limit is ever more tightening with increase in repetition rate as the multipulse optical damage threshold goes down with increase in the number of pulses. There are many factors that control this phenomena starting with underlying physical processes, material and environmental properties and irradiation conditions. Together this makes the process complex, not necessary deterministic and hardly predictable even in ultrashort pulse ranges (<1 ps) further underlining the differences from deterministic single-shot damage. In order to reduce the impact or at least determine the service time of optical components it is necessary to further our understanding of the multiple pulse damage formation and to evaluate the impact of the various contributing parameters. While there already exist theoretical models [1] describing multipulse optical damage formation to some level, further qualitative studies are essential as there is evidence of varying damage modes [2] indicating several damage mechanisms as well as the necessity to constrain the many free parameters used in the modeling.