Laser pulse heating

Recently, interest has developed in pulsed heating effects on a copper surface. Pulsed heating is one of the limits on the gradient of a structure based linac. The heat generated by an intense RF pulse on the metal surface can result in hundreds of degrees of temperature rise at 1 GeV/m. After a certain number of cycles, the metal may crack due to thermal fatigue and the surface properties may deteriorate. In this article, we describe an experiment to use a high power laser to study the pulsed temperature rise on a metal surface.