Experimental scaling law for mass ablation rate from a Sn plasma generated by a 1064 nm laser

The ablation depth in planar Sn targets irradiated with a pulsed 1064 nm laser was investigated over laser intensities from 3×1011 to 2×1012 W/cm2. The ablation depth was measured by irradiating a thin layer of Sn evaporated onto a Si wafer, and looking for signatures of Si ions in the expanding plasma with spectroscopic and particle diagnostics. It was found that ablation depth scales with laser intensity to the (5/9)th power, which is consistent with analytical models of steady-state laser ablation, as well as empirical formulae from previous studies of mass ablation rate in overlapping parameter space. In addition, the scaling of mass ablation rate with atomic number of the target as given by empirical formulae in previous studies using targets such as C and Al, are shown to remain valid for the higher atomic number of the target (Z=50) used in these experiments.