electromagnetic field at the particl e has to be computed numerically. An example of such a computation using a program based on [49] is given in Fig. 4. But not only doe s the Mie theory describe an enhancement of the laser intensity in the particles' near field, it also predicts that for certain values of the size parameter nd/X (d denoting the particle diameter, À the laser wavelength) the enhancement should be particularly efficient, resulting in a resonant intensity enhancement, the so-called "Mie-resonances". 3.2.2. Near-field induced substrate damage When inspecting contaminated samples by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) or atomic force microscopy (AFM ) after DLC using ns laser pulses, the consequences of the field enhancement process became obvious: all over the cleaned areas w e found substrate damages localized exactly at the former particle positions [35, 37-39]. These damages manifested as melting pools or even holes in the surface, typical examples can be seen in Fig. 5. The consequences for the laser cleaning process are obvious. The intensity enhancement reduces the maximum laser fluence that can be applied in the process. Usually in laser cleaning studies [19, 31 ] the laser fluence corresponding to the melting threshold of a bare surface is taken as the damage threshold fluence. Our experiments show clearly that this is an inadequate definition. Instead one must take into account the enhanced laser fluence underneath the particles, as it will be discussed in Section 4. Fro m the obtained AFM images we were able to analyse in detail the surface profile at the damaged sites. Here we found that for high field enhancement factors the silicon substrate was not only molten , but that some material was even ablated (see Sec. 4). The momentum transfer to the particles during the ablation process significantly contributes to the cleanin g process and hence local substrate ablation