Energy coupling in short pulse laser solid interactions and its impact for space debris removal.

Significant advances have been made over the last decade to improve the performance, efficiency, and contrast of high peak and average power laser systems, driven by their use in a wide variety of fields, from the industrial to the scientific. As the contrast of the lasers has improved, interactions with contrasts of 1012 are now routinely undertaken. At such high contrasts, there is negligible preplasma formation and the ionized surface layer created by subpicosecond-duration pulses typically forms a highly reflective "plasma mirror" capable of reflecting between 70% and 90% of the incident energy. Although such interactions are of significant interest for applications such as harmonic source production and to enable the underlying physics to be studied, their low absorption can limit their usefulness for applications such as space debris removal.

Laser interaction with materials: introduction.

Laser-materials interaction is the fascinating nexus where laser physics, optical physics, and materials science intersect. Applications include microdeposition via laser-induced forward transfer of thin films, clean materials processing with femtosecond beams, creating color filters with nanoparticles, generating very high density storage sites on subpicosecond time scales, structuring solar cell surfaces for higher efficiency, making nanostructures that would be impossible by other means, and creating in-volume waveguiding structures using femtosecond laser filaments.