Direct Correlation of Local Fluence to Ablation Morphology Created by a Single Femtosecond Laser Pulse

Experimental studies on the fundamentals of laser ablation often rely on characterizing ablated morphologies at irradiated spots as first clues to the processes involved. For example, the regression of the squared diameter of ablated spots as a function of the pulse energy is a well-known and often-used method to measure the laser-induced damage threshold of materials [1] . However, there is a significant amount of information lost during the conversion of two-dimensional data to a single representative value, for example, in the above case, the diameter. Were more of the original information utilized, more accurate and complete data on the laser ablation phenomena could be retrieved from each irreversible ablation trial. Such high-throughput and reliable measurement methods are particularly important when aiming for big-data enabled analysis, such as deep-learning approaches.