Nanosecond laser preheating effect on ablation morphology and plasma emission in collinear dual-pulse laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy

Abstract Focus-offset collinear dual-pulse laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy is designed and used to investigate the laser ablation and spectral intensity with an aluminum alloy sample. The laser crater morphologies and ablation volumes were measured. An inter-pulse time delay dependent ablation efficiency on a nanosecond laser-heated sample was observed, which was similar to the trend of spectral intensity versus inter-pulse time delay in the delay time less than 3 μ s. Based on the observation, the nanosecond pulse laser preheating effect on subsequent second laser ablation and signal enhancement is discussed, which will be helpful for understanding the ablation and signal enhancement mechanism in the standard collinear DP-LIBS technique.