Laser damage mitigation' is a process developed to prevent the growth of nanosecond laser-initiated damage sites under successive irradiation. It consists of re-fusing the damage area with a CO2 laser. In this paper we investigate the stress field created around mitigated sites which could have an influence on the efficiency of the process. A numerical model of CO2 laser interaction with fused silica is developed. It takes into account laser energy absorption, heat transfer, thermally induced stress and birefringence. Residual stress near mitigated sites in fused silica samples is characterized with specific photoelastic methods and theoretical data are compared to experiments. The stress distribution and quantitative values of stress levels are obtained for sites treated with the CO2 laser in various conditions of energy deposition (beam size, pulse duration, incident power). The results provided evidence that the presence of birefringence/residual stress around the mitigated sites has an effect on their laser damage resistance.

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Detection and measurement of subsurface damage of ground optical surfaces are of major concern in the assessment of high damage thresholds fused silica optics for high power laser applications. We herein detail a new principle of SSD measurement based on the utilization of HF acid etching. We also review and compare different subsurface damage (SSD) characterization techniques applied to ground and fine ground fused silica samples. We demonstrate good concordance between the different measurements.

A self-consistent approach is proposed to determine the temperature dependent thermal conductivity k(T) of fused silica, for a range of temperatures up to material evaporation using a CO2 laser irradiation. Calculation of the temperature of silica using a two-dimensional axi-symmetric code was linked step by step as the laser power was increased with experimental measurements using infrared thermography. We show that previously reported k(T) does not reproduce the temporal profile as well as our adaptive fit which shows that k(T) evolves with slope discontinuities at the annealing temperature and the softening temperature.