Comparison of emission signals for different polarizations in femtosecond laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy

In this study, a femtosecond laser was focused to ablate brass target and generate plasma emission in air. The influence of lens to sample distance (LTSD) on spectral emission of brass plasma under linearly and circularly polarized pulses with different pulse energies was investigated. The results indicated that the position with the strongest spectral emission moved toward focusing lens with increasing the energy. At the same laser energy, the line emission under circularly polarized pulse was stronger compared with linearly polarized pulse for different LTSDs. Next, electron temperature and density of the plasma were obtained with Cu (I) lines, indicating that the electron temperature and density under circularly polarized pulse were higher compared to that under linearly polarized pulse. Therefore, changing the laser polarization is a simple and effective way to improve the spectral emission intensity of femtosecond laser-induced plasma.