Femtosecond-resolved ablation dynamics of Si in the near field of a small dielectric particle

• Paul Kühler,
• Daniel Puerto,
• Mario Mosbacher,
• Paul Leiderer,
• Francisco Javier Garcia de Abajo,
• Jan Siegel and
• Javier Solis

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2013, 4, 501–509, doi:10.3762/bjnano.4.59

• after excitation. Keywords: crystalline Si; fs-resolved microscopy; laser ablation; near-field enhancement; ultrafast dynamics; Introduction The term “near field optics” is used to describe the phenomena associated to non-propagating and highly localized electromagnetic fields and their interaction

• surface when being irradiated with a 120 fs long 800 nm wavelength laser pulse. In the study, we have reached locally enhanced fluences up to 35 J/cm2 (≈300 TW/cm2) (for comparison the fluence threshold for surface ablation is ≈0.5 J/cm2 [12]) and used fs-resolved microscopy in order to access time scales

• of a dielectric particle upon illumination with a 120 fs laser pulses at 800 nm. For this purpose we have used fs-resolved microscopy to compare the behavior of regions excited inside and outside the near field region generated by a 7.9 μm-diameter SiO2-sphere for different time delays where