A numerical simulation method for the laser-induced temperature distribution

A numerical simulation approach for the evaluation of temperature distribution in a substrate during the laser processing is developed. The explicit finite-difference solution of the heat (diffusion) equation is chosen as the starting point in order to simply retain general nonlinearity, physical transparency, and flexibility of the procedure. The method is tested with a simulation of silicon substrate irradiated by cw argon laser, and the results are compared with those from experiments and exact analytical results, where available. Deficiences due to the omission of the nonlinearity, i.e., the temperature dependency of the material properties, in the results of approximative analytical approaches are discussed.