Novel non-thermal Ablation Mechanics in the Laser Ablation of Silicon
arXiv:2602.06099 · doi:10.1007/978-3-031-91312-9_10
Abstract
We investigate the non-thermal material dynamics of strongly excited silicon during ultra-fast laser ablation. In contrast to metals, silicon shows strongly excitation-dependent interatomic bonding strengths, which gives rise to a number of unique material dynamics like non-thermal melting, Coulomb explosions and altered carrier heat conduction due to charge carrier confinement. In this study, we report novel non-thermal ablation mechanisms in the ultra-fast single shot laser ablation of silicon and perform large scale massive multi-parallel simulations on experimentally achievable length scales with atomistic resolution. For this, we model the ultra-fast carrier dynamics utilizing the Thermal-Spike-Model coupled to Molecular Dynamics simulations and include the accompanied excitation-dependent nonthermal bonding strength manipulation by application of the excitation-dependent modified Tersoff Potential. Further, we present first results on the systematic construction of the excitation-dependent phase diagram of silicon by thermodynamic integration.
The article has been published in High Performance Computing in Science and Engineering '23, eds. Th. Ludwig, P. Bastian, M.M. Resch, Springer Nature (2026) pages 133-147. Unfortunately, Fig. 2 (b) in the book is wrong due to a typesetting error