Laser Chemistry
Volume 9, Issue 1-3, Pages 147-154
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/LC.9.147
Analysis of the Dynamics of the Interaction of Ultraviolet Lasers With Organic Polymers
IBM, T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights 10598, NY, USA
Received 15 January 1988; Accepted 2 March 1988
Copyright © 1988 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
The time-dependent treatment of the dynamics of the ablation of polymers that was proposed by Sutcliffe and Srinivasan has been used here to analyze the etching of several polymers by pulsed, ultraviolet laser radiation. For five polymers which span a wide range of absorptivities in the ultraviolet, the ablation threshold which is expressed in terms of the “useful” photon density in the ablation volume falls within a narrow range (±50%). The most intense absorbers show the most deviation from the average value. The flux threshold which defines the absorbed photon level above which the photons are useful in producing ablation is strongly influenced by the absorptivity of the polymer. The extension of these ideas to the ablation of tissue which contains only 20% polymer is also discussed.