A non-evaporative technique is used to mitigate damage sites with lateral sizes in a range from 50 μm to 400 μm and depths smaller than 100 μm.The influence of the pulse frequency of a CO 2 laser on the mitigation effect is studied.It is found that a more symmetrical and smooth mitigation crater can be obtained by increasing the laser pulse frequency form 0.1 to 20 kHz.Furthermore,the sizes of laser-affected and distorted zones decrease with the increase of the laser pulse frequency,leading to less degradation of the wave-front quality of the conditioned sample.The energy density of the CO 2 laser beam is introduced for selecting the mitigation parameters.The damage sites can be successfully mitigated by increasing the energy density in a ramped way.Finally,the laser-induced damage threshold（LIDT） of the mitigated site is tested using 355 nm laser beam with a small spot（0.23 mm 2） and a large spot（3.14 mm 2）,separately.It is shown that the non-evaporative mitigation technique is a successful method to stop damage re-initiation since the average LIDTs of mitigated sites tested with small or large laser spots are higher than that of pristine material.
One of the main factors of laser induced damage is the modulation to incident laser which is caused by the defect in the subsurface of the fused silica. In this work, the repaired damage site irradiated by CO2 laser is simplified to a Gaussian rotation according to the corresponding experimental results. Then, the three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain method is employed to simulate the electric field intensity distribution in the vicinity of this kind of defect in fused silica front subsurface. The simulated results show that the modulation is notable, the Emax is about 2.6 times the irradiated electric field intensity in the fused silica with the damage site （the width is 1.5 μm and depth is 2.3 μm） though the damage site is repaired by CO2 laser. The phenomenon and the theoretical result of the annular laser enhancement existed on the rear surface are first verified effectively, which agrees well with the corresponding experimental results. The relations between the maximal electric field intensity in fused silica with defect depth and width are given respectively. Meanwhile, the corresponding physical mechanism is analysed theoretically in detail.
The structure evolution of fused silica induced by CO2 laser irradiation (with a wavelength of 10.6 μm) is studied in detail.In the non-evaporation mitigation process,the irradiation time should be long enough to completely eliminate damage.However,there is a raised rim around the mitigated site.The rim height is enhanced when the irradiation time increases,and the mitigated site can lead to off-axis and on-axis downstream light intensification.Volume shrinkage occurs during the irradiation and rapid cooling processes,and this may be due to a decrease in the Si O Si bond angle.The distribution of debris overlaps with the maximum phase retardance induced by stress.The debris arouses an enhanced light absorption in the region from 220nm to 800nm.
