The effect of pulse duration on laser-induced damage by 1053-nm light in potassium dihydrogen phosphate crystals

Laser induced damage in potassium dihydogen phosphate (KDP) has previously been shown to depend significantly on pulse duration for 351-nm Gaussian pulses. In this work we studied the properties of damage initiated by 1053-nm temporally Gaussian pulses with 10ns and 3ns FWHM durations. Our results indicate that the number of damage sites induced by 1053-nm light scales with pulse duration (τ) as τ1/τ2)0.17 in contrast to the previously reported results for 351-nm light as (τ1/τ2)0.35. This indicates that damage site formation is significantly less probable at longer wavelengths for a given fluence.