Threshold fluence and incubation during multi-pulse ultrafast laser ablation of quartz

In this work, the incubation effect on the laser ablation threshold of quartz, after multi-shot irradiation with femtosecond pulses at 1030-nm-wavelength with different repetition rates, was investigated. A strong decrease of the multi-pulse ablation threshold with the number of pulses N was found due to incubation. Moreover, the influence of the repetition rate was negligible in the investigated frequency range which went from 0.06 to 200 kHz. A saturation of the threshold fluence value was observed at number of pulses N > 100 which has been found to be well fitted by an exponential incubation model. Using such model, we estimated the single-pulse ablation threshold value and the incubation coefficient for quartz, which were found equal to Fth,1 = 6.23 ± 0.23 J/cm2 and k = 0.058 ± 0.004.