title: Generation of Scratches and Their Effects on Laser Damage Performance of Silica Glass.
abstract: Scratches are deleterious to precision optics because they can obscure and modulate incident laser light, which will increase the probability of damage to optical components. We here imitated the generation of brittle and ductile scratches during polishing process and endeavored to find out the possible influence of scratches on laser induced damage. Brittle scratches can be induced by spiking large sized abrasives and small abrasives may only generate ductile scratches. Both surface roughness and transmittivity are degraded due to the appearance of brittle scratches while ductile scratches make little difference to surface roughness and transmittance. However, ductile and brittle scratches greatly increase the density of damage about one order of magnitude relative to unscratched surface. In particular, ductile scratches also play an unignorable role in laser induced damage, which is different from previous knowledge. Furthermore, ZrO2and Al2O3polished surfaces appear to perform best in terms of damage density.
authors.affiliation: Fine Optical Engineering Research Centre, Chengdu 610041, China.
authors.forename: Yaguo
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Fine Optical Engineering Research Centre, Chengdu 610041, China.
authors.forename: Hui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Ye
authors.affiliation: Fine Optical Engineering Research Centre, Chengdu 610041, China.
authors.forename: Zhigang
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Yuan
authors.affiliation: Fine Optical Engineering Research Centre, Chengdu 610041, China.
authors.forename: Zhichao
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Fine Optical Engineering Research Centre, Chengdu 610041, China.
authors.forename: Yi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.affiliation: Fine Optical Engineering Research Centre, Chengdu 610041, China.
authors.forename: Zhe
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Fine Optical Engineering Research Centre, Chengdu 610041, China.
authors.forename: Shijie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: Fine Optical Engineering Research Centre, Chengdu 610041, China.
authors.forename: Jian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Research Center of Laser Fusion, China Academy of Engineering Physics, Mianyang 621900, China.
authors.forename: Qiao
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Xu