Femtosecond laser pulse interaction with solid targets and investigations of the ablation plume.

Laser ablation processes based on ultrafast (fs) pulses offer significant potential advantages over the case of conventional nanosecond lasers, as: i) the ability to decouple the ablated volume from the adjoint target mass; ii) the lowering of threshold ablation fluence by a factor of 10. This allows that also the most intractable materials, such as refractory metals, can be cleanly and congruently ablated. The study of the transport properties in laser-produced plasmas will be mainly carried out by time of flight mass spectrometry and optical spectroscopy, and can shed light on the different mechanisms involved in their formation and evolution in time and space [see e.g., S. Amoruso et al., J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 32, R131 (1999)], and to analyze possible applications in thin film deposition [see e.g., P.R. Willmott and J.R. Hubler, Rev. Mod. Phys. 72, 315 (2000)].