“…As noted in the previous section, irradiation of a metal with high-power nanosecond laser pulses leads to the formation in it of a macrolayer, whose thickness is determined by the penetration depth of the radiation and which has a considerable amount of excess energy. This leads to the fact that shortly after the beginning of the laser irradiation (with a delay of 5-10 ns for the 20-nanosecond pulse [45] and 30-40 ns for the 100-nanosecond pulse [46]), in the near-surface region of the target there appears a bright luminous vaporplasma formation expanding rapidly in the direction of the environment while interacting with the acting laser pulse [48]. Since the processes of vapor outfl ow into a vacuum and into a gas atmosphere differ radically, the spatial, energy, spectral, and other characteristics of erosion torches will differ considerably even under comparable irradiation conditions [15,16,49,50].…”