A. Claverie

Spallation generated by femtosecond laser driven shocks in thin metallic targets

Spallation induced by a laser driven shock has been studied for two decades on time scales of nanosecond order. The evolution of laser technologies now opens access to sources whose pulse duration is under the picosecond, corresponding to characteristic times of numerous microscopic phenomena. In this ultra-short irradiation regime, spallation experiments have been performed with time-resolved measurements of the free surface. These measurements, complemented with post-test observations, have been compared with numerical simulations to check the consistency of modelling of the laser–matter interaction, shock propagation and to the study of dynamic damage at this ultra-short time scale, inducing strong tensile stress states at very high strain rates.

PDV MEASUREMENTS OF NS AND FS LASER DRIVEN SHOCK EXPERIMENTS ON SOLID TARGETS

We present a new heterodyne velocimeter setup embedding a second low‐power frequency‐tunable laser acting as a local oscillator. We thus double the overall bandwidth of the system and we make the tuning of the laser power levels easier, to achieve good matching between the electric signal matching and the dynamics of the detector. Recently, we used this velocimeter onto metallic target shock driven by high power laser. The aim is to test the ability of this means to reveal shock propagation and effects into materials under extremely high strain rate with fast variations into the loading evolution. Spallation and fragmentation experiments carried out on aluminum samples were performed on the LULI2000 laser (800 J, 3 ns) and on the 100 TW laser (30 J, 300 fs) of the Ecole Polytechnique, with both VISAR and HV diagnostics. Comparisons reveal a very good consistency of experimental results.