Surface Plasmon Assisted Gentle Ablation of Nanostructures by Femtosecond Oscillator

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a novel nanomachining technique using surface plasmon waves excited by ultrafast laser pulses, enabling gentle, precise ablation of nanostructures with minimal thermal damage.

Contribution

The study introduces a surface plasmon-assisted ablation method that works for both metals and dielectrics using ultralow fluence femtosecond laser pulses.

Findings

Ablation threshold matches analytical predictions.

Method enables nanostructure modification without thermal damage.

Can deposit high-quality nano films at low density.

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate the use of subwavelength optical nanoantennae to assist the gentle ablation of nanostructures directly using ultralow fluence from a Ti: sapphire oscillator through the excitation of surface plasmon waves. We show that this ablation mechanism is the same for metal and dielectric. The analytical solutions of ablation threshold are in excellent agreement with the experiment estimations. Surface plasmon assisted locally enhanced ablation at nanoscale provides a method for nanomachining, manipulation and modification the nanostructures without collateral thermal damage to the materials. It is also shown that this ablation can deposit low-density high quality thin nano film.