Ablation experiments in several glasses with single and multishot irradiation by laser pulses in the 10-fs pulse duration domain are presented; physical and technological implications are discussed. We demonstrate that these short pulses offer the potential for lateral and vertical machining precision of the order of 100 nm.
Structuring of dielectric and metallic materials with ultrashort laser pulses between 20 fs and 3 ps
(1997)
Laser-micromachining of barium aluminum borosilicate glass, fused silica and stainless steel has been extended down to a pulse duration of 20 fs generated by a Ti:sapphire laser system at a wavelength of 0.8 micrometer. A systematic study shows that, below 100 fs, an enhanced precision and a substantial decrease of the ablation threshold fluence in comparison to pulse laser processing with pulses in the picosecond and nanosecond range could be achieved. The physical mechanism and the technical relevance of this novel microtechnology is discussed.