Speaker
Description
Investigations of thin films produced by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) using ultrafast lasers have previously found low optical loss and good uniformity but were limited by a combination of output power, pulse duration, and single pulse energy of available lasers at the time. These all have steadily increased over the past two decades and allow us to revisit ultrafast PLD (UPLD) today in the context of mechanical loss and coating thermal noise. Contrary to conventional PLD, ultrafast sub-picosecond pulses can access the so-called electro-static ablation regime. Also termed cold ablation, this process avoids significant photon-phonon coupling and directly creates a surface plasma, leading to negligible target heating and a fully atomised material plume that rapidly accelerates away from the target. We present efforts to set up a prototype reaction chamber at the University of Birmingham for the deposition of thin film coatings using UPLD.