Improved two-temperature model and its application in ultrashort laser heating of metal films

The two-temperature model has been widely used to predict the electron and phonon temperature distributions in ultrashort laser processing of metals. However, estimations of some important thermal and optical properties in the existing two-temperature model are limited to low laser fluences in which the electron temperatures are much lower than the Fermi temperature. This paper extends the existing two-temperature model to high electron temperatures by using full-run quantum treatments to calculate the significantly varying properties, including the electron heat capacity, electron relaxation time, electron conductivity, reflectivity, and absorption coefficient. The proposed model predicts the damage thresholds more accurately than the existing model for gold films when compared with published experimental results.