Correlation between properties of a solid sample and laser-induced plasma parameters

To investigate the influence of mechanical properties of a solid sample on the laser-induced plasma parameters (temperature and mass ablated) a number of aluminum–lithium alloys and lithium ferrites with different microstructure and composition have been studied. The specific approach to estimate excitation temperature for low-resolution emission spectra has been developed. The main limitations of this approach were discussed on the basis of comparison with the energy width of several multiplets. Overall uncertainties for temperature calculation were evaluated by taking into account the accuracy of Einstein's coefficients and errors of the proposed multiplets method. The temporal evolution of laser plasma during the evaporation of these materials was studied. Extremely high value of the Li I excitation temperature has been estimated to be T > 10⁵ K for the annealed ferrite ablation, in contrast to the temperature T  1.5 · 10⁴ K for non-annealed ferrite. Only for ablation of annealed ferrite the Li II emission line at 548.4 nm was observed. It means that this laser-induced plasma was the hottest. In the case of alloys, the temperature calculated by using Li I transitions was proportional to the microhardness of the solid samples. The negative correlation between crater volume/opto-acoustic signal and alloy microhardness was observed. At the first pulses the mechanical properties of the alloys didn't correlate with the ablated mass, while the maximal correlation coefficients were observed after ablation by 10 or 50 consequent laser pulses.