Ultrafast laser irradiation can induce spontaneous self-organization of surfaces into dissipative structures with nanoscale reliefs. These surface patterns emerge from symmetry-breaking dynamical processes that occur in Rayleigh-Bénard-like instabilities. In this study, we demonstrate that the coexistence and competition between surface patterns of different symmetries in two dimensions can be numerically unraveled using the stochastic generalized Swift-Hohenberg model. We originally propose a deep convolutional network to identify and learn the dominant modes that stabilize for a given bifurcation and quadratic model coefficients. The model is scale-invariant and has been calibrated on microscopy measurements using a physics-guided machine learning strategy. Our approach enables the identification of experimental irradiation conditions for a desired self-organization pattern. It can be generally applied to predict structure formation in situations where the underlying physics can be approximately described by a self-organization process and data is sparse and nontime series. Our Letter paves the way for supervised local manipulation of matter using timely controlled optical fields in laser manufacturing.

• Received 21 June 2022
• Revised 20 December 2022
• Accepted 24 April 2023

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.226201