Linearly Scaling Molecular Dynamic Modeling To Simulate Picosecond Laser Ablation of a Silicon Carbide Crystal

Abstract

A molecular dynamics model for picosecond laser ablation of nanoscale silicon carbide crystals was established by linearly scaling the laser focal diameter, and the correlation between the molecular dynamic simulation of the nanoscale and the experimental reproduction of the microscale was achieved. The calculation accuracy of the molecular dynamic model was verified by ablating the surface of silicon carbide wafers with a laser pulse width of 37 ps. On this basis, this paper further investigated the influence of the laser pulse width and fluence on the surface ablation damage and modification width, threshold, and lattice temperature. The results showed that, when the laser pulse width is higher than 10 ps, the silicon carbide damage threshold increases with increasing the pulse width, while the modification threshold is almost unaffected by the pulse width. In addition, the influence of crystal orientation has been studied, and laser irradiation along the [1–100] crystal orientation induces a higher peak temperature, larger damage, and modification width and threshold, followed by irradiation along the [0001] crystal orientation and lowest along the [11–20] crystal orientation. Finally, with the linear scaling value increasing, the spatial distribution of the laser energy field deviates more from the actual situation, resulting in the calculated results being more consistent with the experimental results. Through this paper, it is demonstrated that this linearly scaled molecular dynamics model can be used to study laser ablation results over tens of micrometers.