Statistical analysis of absorptive laser damage in dielectric thin films

The Weibull distribution arises as an example of the theory of extreme events. It is commonly used to fit statistical data arising in the failure analysis of electrical components and in DC breakdown of materials. This distribution is employed to analyze time-to-damage and intensity-to-damage statistics obtained when irradiating thin film coated samples of SiO2, ZrO2, and Al2O3 with tightly focused laser beams. The data used is furnished by Milam. The fit to the data is excellent; and least squared correlation coefficients greater than 0.9 are often obtained.