Investigation of the effect of laser parameters on the target, plume and plasma behavior during and after laser-solid interaction

A detailed theoretical and experimental analysis is performed for a wide range of laser operating conditions, typical for laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) and laser ablation (LA) experiments on copper metallic target. The plasma parameters were experimentally estimated from the line intensities ratio which reflects the relative population of neutral excited species in the plasma. In the case of LA experiments the highest temperature observed was 8210 ± 370 K. In case of LIBS measurements, a maximum temperature of 8123 K has been determined. The experimental results are in good agreement with a stationary, hydrodynamic model. We have theoretically investigated the plasma emission based on the generalized collisional-radiative model as implemented in the ADAS interconnected set of computer codes and data collections. The ionic population density distribution over the ground and excited states into the cooper plasma is graphically displayed as output from the code. The theoretical line intensity ratios are in good agreement with experimental values for the electron density and temperature range measured in our experiments.