About the mechanisms of femtosecond laser damage and ablation of dielectric materials

In this paper, we perform a simple experiment to precisely evaluate in the same operating conditions the behaviour of the damage and ablation thresholds under the wide excursion of a single experimental interaction parameter, i.e. the laser pulse duration. The experiments are done at 800 nm in single shot regime to avoid any incubation effects. We then measure and model the damage and ablation thresholds at the surface of a well-known dielectric material, e.g. fused silica, using pulses ranging from 7 fs to 300 fs. The relevant criteria to numerically assess the damage and ablation thresholds are related to the lattice melting temperature T_m and the electronic cohesion temperature T_ec, in accordance with experimental observations.