Solutions for lifetime laser damage to materials

Work by PLS scientists Jae-Hyuck Yoo and Andrew Lange (both MSD) and Engineering’s John Chesser, Steve Falabella, and Selim Elhadj was recently highlighted in Physica Status Solidi A: Applications and Materials Science as the November 2019 cover story. The research described in the article explores guidelines for designing materials with high laser damage lifetimes. To investigate damage thresholds, the team exposed conductive and transparent materials with carrier densities spanning five orders of magnitude to repeated nanosecond laser pulses at near-infrared wavelengths. The researchers found a direct relationship between lower laser-damage lifetime thresholds of transparent optoelectrical materials and high free-carrier absorption when subjected to high peak-power exposures. As a result of this work, a three-year multi-institutional project was funded by the DOE EERE Advanced Manufacturing Office to validate a multimodal imaging approach for detecting device-relevant defects in bulk GaN semiconductors used in power-electronics and optoelectronics devices.

This effort was funded by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program (15-ERD-057).

[J.-H. Yoo, A. Lange, J. Chesser, S. Falabella, and S. Elhadj, A Survey of Transparent Conducting Films and Optoelectrical Materials for High Optical Power Applications, Physica Status Solidi A: Applications and Materials Science 216, 22 (2019), doi: 10.1002/pssa.201900459.]