Evidence of explosive boiling during laser ablation of InSb

InSb is a very attractive material for both fundamental studies and device fabrication owing to its small band gap and large carrier mobility. Present study has been conducted with the objective of studying the evolution of laser damage at very high laser power densities and to understand the mass removal process which can be used for pulse laser deposition and laser ablation applications in InSb. We report here the laser induced ablation studies in optically polished InSb at 1.06 mum wavelength in the nanosecond regime in the power density range of 4.25 x 10⁸ -1.05 x 10⁹ W/cm² which is well above the melting threshold of 6.0 x 10⁶ W/cm² of these samples.