A comparative study of emission efficiencies in low-pressure argon plasmas induced by picosecond and nanosecond Nd YAG lasers

An experimental study is performed on the comparative advantages of nanosecond (ns) and picosecond (ps) lasers in laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) analysis. The experiment focused on the relative efficiencies of the plasma emission induced by the two lasers in low-pressure Ar ambient gas for samples of various hardnesses. It is shown that the emission intensities are consistenly reduced when the ns laser is replaced by the ps laser. This is explained as the consequence of the increased power density delivered by the ps laser, which results in a time mismatch between the passage of the ablated atoms and the formation of the shock wave. The time mismatch in turn leads to less effective thermal excitation by the shock wave plasma and the hence reduced emission intensity. Furthermore, this adverse effect is found to worsen for softer samples due to the slower formation of the shock wave. These results are obtained with the same volumes of craters produced by the two lasers on the same sample, which implies that ns laser irradiation has higher emission efficiency than ps laser irradiation.