Hydrodynamic regime of laser ablation of metals by ultrashort laser pulses of low fluence

Metal ablation taking into account hydrodynamics of a dense ablated material with ion temperature close to the critical one is considered. The extended two-temperature model taking into account the hydrodynamic plasma expansion, degeneracy of the electron gas, cold pressure of ions and interaction between the electron and ion subsystems (nonideality of the metal plasma) is developed. The new version of the RAPID code is used to perform calculations of ablation rates for several metal targets under conditions where the electron degeneracy is important.