From ripples to spikes: A hydrodynamical mechanism to interpret femtosecond laser-induced self-assembled structures

By G. Tsibidis, C. Fotakis, Emmanuel Stratakis. 2015

223 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Materials irradiated with multiple femtosecond laser pulses in sub-ablation conditions are observed to develop various types of self-assembled morphologies that range from nano-ripples to periodic micro-grooves and quasi-periodic micro-spikes. Here, we present a physical scenario that couples electrodynamics, describing surface plasmon excitation, with hydrodynamics, describing Marangoni convection, to elucidate this important sub-ablation regime of light matter interaction in which matter is being modified, however, the underlying process is not yet fully understood. The proposed physical mechanism could be generally applicable to practically any conductive material structured by ultrashort laser pulses, therefore it can be useful for the interpretation of further critical aspects of light matter interaction.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Computational Mechanics, Mechanics of Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/75798dc53b7f72248ef1d1796c40f8be8f44d47d