Two-temperature model for ultrafast melting of Au-based bimetallic films interacting with single-pulse femtosecond laser: Theoretical study of damage threshold

Ultrashort-pulse laser excitation and associated thermal damage of single-layer metallic films have been extensively studied both theoretically as well as experimentally. However, study of ultrafast heat transfer mechanism in bimetallic films, a topic of immense current interest for designing next-generation optical components with better thermal resilience, is limited to a low fluence regime. Moreover, available results for damage threshold (DT) of bimetallic films have several ambiguities. The current work is an attempt towards development of comprehensive theory for the DT of Au-based bimetallic films, analyzing its dependence on associated physical parameters and bridging the gap in existing literature. This has been achieved by developing fully implicit two-temperature model-based Python code. Excellent agreement of the predicted temperature profiles with recently reported [E. L. Gurevich, Y. Levy, S. V. Gurevich, and N. M. Bulgakova, Phys. Rev. B 95, 054305 (2017)] femtosecond laser irradiated Au film validates the code. Subsequently, the code is utilized to investigate the influence of different metallic substrates, $M$ ($M$ = Ni, Cr, Cu) on ultrafast melting damage of $\mathrm{Au}\text{/}M$ films excited by single-pulse femtosecond laser. Simulations carried out for increasing Au layer thickness revealed a nonmonotonic variation of DT for all substrates. This study also brought out an important observation that for every substrate metal, there exists an optimum Au thickness for maximizing the incipient and the complete melting threshold. Maximum achievable enhancement for $\mathrm{Au}\text{/}M$ films over pure Au are found to be 30%, 22%, and 14% with Cu, Ni, and Cr substrates, respectively. The observed distinction in maximum DT among three different $\mathrm{Au}\text{/}M$ targets is explained by developing appropriate thermophysical models. Finally, an empirical function is proposed here for expressing nonmonotonic variation of two-layer DTs. Very good agreement between the substrate-specific peak positions predicted by the proposed function and effective electron diffusion length arising from thermophysical analysis makes the modeling robust and applicable for a wide range of laser wavelengths as well as arbitrary combinations of bimetallic films.