Unraveling Spatio-Temporal Chemistry Evolution in Laser Ablation Plumes and Its Relation to Initial Plasma Conditions
The chemistry evolution in a laser ablation plume depends strongly on its initial physical conditions. In this article, we investigate the impact of plasma generation conditions on the interrelated phenomena of expansion dynamics, plasma chemistry, and physical conditions. Plasmas are produced from a uranium metal target in air using nanosecond, femtosecond, and femtosecond filament-assisted laser ablation. Time-resolved two-dimensional spectral imaging was performed for evaluating the spatio-temporal evolu-tion of atoms, diatoms, polyatomic molecules, and nanoparticles in situ. Emission spectral features reveal that molecular formation occurs at early times in both femtosecond and filament ablation plumes, although with different temporal decay. In contrast, mo-lecular formation is found to occur at much later times in nanosecond plasma evolution. Spectral modeling is used to infer tem-poral behavior of plasma excitation temperature, and results highlighted that nanosecond plume temperatures decay rapidly while plumes generated by filament ablation show slowest decay. In this work, we find U atoms and UO molecules co-exist in ultrafast laser produced plasmas even at early times after plasma onset owing to favorable temperatures for molecular formation. Regardless of irradiation conditions, plume emission features showed presence of higher oxides (i.e. UxOy), although with different temporal histories. Our study provides insight into the impact of plasma generation conditions on chemistry evolution in plasmas produced from traditional focused femtosecond, nanosecond, and filament-assisted laser ablation.