Abstract

The interaction of ultrafast laser pulses with materials is mainly influenced by phonon-electron interaction. Plasma formation and ablation with limited heat transfer to the lattice lead to very high process quality, but at the cost of lower throughput compared to nanosecond pulses. During the last decade high energy picosecond lasers have found several applications in material processing where limited HAZ and increased machining accuracy are important. Applications include thin film removal, surface structuring, cutting of transparent materials, medical device manufacturing, and internal marking. The lower processing throughput of ultrafast lasers can be partially overcome by using burst mode operation with pulse separations of 10s of ns.

© 2013 IEEE