Simulation of Ultrashort Laser Pulse Absorption At the Water-metal Interface in Laser-Induced Plasma Micro-Machining
Abstract This work proposes a physically consistent numerical model to simulate ultrashort laser absorption by a metallic workpiece at the water-metal interface when optical breakdown of the dielectric occurs. The simulation couples the framework of the Finite-Difference Time-Domain method used in computational electromagnetics with the constitutive relation derived from both the model of direct ablation of metals and the first order model of water breakdown. The simulation is used to describe interface ablation processes such as Laser-Induced Plasma Micro-Machining. Applied to the water-aluminum interface, the model is able to describe the metal absorption and the dielectric breakdown threshold in three-dimensional geometry. It is an extensible monolithic approach in which the absorption by different materials can be described by simply changing the constitutive relations.