We present a complete study, together with a careful experimental metrology, on single shot ablation of fused silica and sapphire induced by femtosecond pulses (<200-fs) ranging from 258 nm to 2000 nm. The wavelength-dependent fluence ablation threshold, increasing up to near infrared and saturating on the infrared range, allows to infer the role of drastically changing photoionization rates following Keldysh formalism. While it is also expected an energy deposition primarily relying on electron heating and avalanche in the infrared, we find deep craters are more efficiently obtained near the ablation threshold but the difference rapidly vanishes at increased fluences.
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