Abstract
Because of its simple composition, vast availability in pure form and ease of processing, vitreous silica is often used as a model to study the physics of amorphous solids. Research in amorphous silica is also motivated by its ubiquity in modern technology, a prominent example being as bulk material in transmissive and diffractive optics for high-power laser applications such as inertial confinement fusion (ICF)1,2. In these applications, stability under high-fluence laser irradiation is a key requirement3, with optical breakdown occurring when the fluence of the beam is higher than the laser-induced damage threshold (LIDT) of the material3. The optical strength of polished fused silica transmissive optics is limited by their surface LIDT3. Surface optical breakdown is accompanied by densification4, formation of point defects5, cratering, material ejection, melting and cracking3. Through a combination of electron diffraction and infrared reflectance measurements we show here that synthetic vitreous silica transforms partially into a defective form of the high-pressure stishovite phase under high-intensity (GW cm−2) laser irradiation. This phase transformation offers one suitable mechanism by which laser-induced damage grows catastrophically once initiated, thereby dramatically shortening the service lifetime of optics used for high-power photonics.
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Acknowledgements
Synthetic stishovite was provided by Baosheng Li at State University of New York, Stony Brook. Work performed at the National Center for Electron Microscopy and at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Material Sciences Division of the US Department of Energy. The authors wish to thank Doreen Ah Tye for her help with the SEM analysis, William S. Wong and Kateri E. Paul for helpful discussions. Work by two of the authors (A.S. and F.Y.G.) was performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Work by W.R. P. was partially supported by the National Science Foundation.
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Salleo, A., Taylor, S., Martin, M. et al. Laser-driven formation of a high-pressure phase in amorphous silica. Nature Mater 2, 796–800 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1013
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1013
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