Modern ultrashort pulsed high power (USP) lasers enable advanced and highly parallel micromachining processes. Due to constraints of the system technology, parallelization and beam shaping is mostly static during the process, which limits many interesting applications. The increasing power limits of liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) spatial light modulators (SLMs) now open the door to dynamic beam shaping and splitting in the machining process. Although the frame rates of high-performance LCoS displays are typically in the range of 60 Hz and above, these devices are still mainly used as programmable diffractive optical elements (DOEs) and usually remain static during the fabrication process due to the high computational cost of conventional computer-generated hologram (CGH) algorithms. Herein, we report on the application of real-time CGH algorithms for dynamically generating and modifying 3D spot-distributions for advanced micromachining processes with high power USP lasers. We use a recently demonstrated algorithm based on compressive sensing combined with a highly parallelized computation on graphics processing units (GPUs). This allows for the calculation of phase holograms on the timescale of typical SLM response time and enables an online adjustment of the beam shape and spot distribution. In a detailed investigation of different CGH generation strategies, the impact of hardware response times, calculation speed and heat accumulations on the parallelized multi-spot laser process is experimentally evaluated on silicon. The presented results reveal the challenges and limits of on-the-fly CGH computation in USP laser material processing with SLMs and assesses its gain in processing flexibility for versatile USP micromachining applications.
A density-dependent two-temperature model is applied to describe laser excitation and the following relaxation processes of silicon in an external electric field. Two approaches on how to describe the effects of the external electric field are presented. The first approach avoids the buildup of internal electric fields due to charge separation by assuming ambipolar diffusion and adds an additional carrier-pair current. In the second approach, electrons and holes are treated separately to account for charge separation and the resulting shielding of the external electric field inside the material. The two approaches are compared to experimental results. Both the first approach and the experimental results show similar tendencies for optimization of laser ablation in the external electric field.
During the last decades laser micromachining became a valuable tool for many applications in automotive, medicine, tool construction, or mobile technology. Beside the quality, processing time and production costs are crucial questions. A promising approach to achieve high throughput combined with good processing quality represent laser ablation by an assisting magnetic-field. Therefore, we studied the influence of an applied magnetic field to the ablation behaviour of silicon by using short and ultrashort laser pulses. Based on the experimental results we report on a first theoretical model that addresses the energy distribution of the heated electrons in the irradiated area.
We present a new fabrication method to realize smooth structures in lithium niobate. Therefore a detailed study on laser micro-polishing using ultrashort laser pulses is carried out by separating the effects of spatial pulse overlap and temporal pulse overlap. The adventage of this approach is the smoothing of the processed area by a simultaneous ablation. That will allow ablation depths between 1 µm and 4 µm with rms-roughness values of ≈20 nm.
Characteristics by laser micromachining of congruent, stoichiometric and doped lithium niobate by using ultrashort laser pulses with different wavelengths from ultraviolet up to infrared were investigated. The ablation thresholds were determined in dependence of c+-side and accordingly c−-side. The strong impact of crystal orientation by micromachining lithium niobate will be additionally shown by the use of a high pulse repetition rate of 1000 kHz. Furthermore, we demonstrate the advantage of processing smooth ridges with high-repetition UV picosecond laser-pulses in combination of post-processing thermal annealing and a low-loss ridge waveguide in congruent LiNbO3 will be demonstrated.
Ridge waveguides in ferroelectric materials like LiNbO3 attended great interest for highly efficient integrated optical devices, for instance, electro-optic modulators, frequency converters and ring resonators. The main challenges are the realization of high index barrier towards the substrate and the processing of smooth ridges for minimized scattering losses. For fabricating ridges a variety of techniques, like chemical and wet etching as well as optical grade dicing, have been investigated in detail. Among them, laser micromachining offers a versatile and flexible processing technology, but up to now only a limited side wall roughness has been achieved by this technique. Here we report on laser micromachining of smooth ridges for low-loss optical waveguides in LiNbO3. The ridges with a top width of 7 µm were fabricated in z-cut LiNbO3 by a combination of UV picosecond micromachining and thermal annealing. The laser processing parameters show a strong influence on the achievable sidewall roughness of the ridges and were systematically investigated and optimized. Finally, the surface quality is further improved by an optimized thermal post-processing. The roughness of the ridges were analysed with confocal microscopy and the scattering losses were measured at an optical characterization wavelength of 632.8 nm by using the end-fire coupling method. In these investigations the index barrier was formed by multi-energy low dose oxygen ion implantation technology in a depth of 2.7 μm. With optimized laser processing parameters and thermal post-processing a scattering loss as low as 0.1 dB/cm has been demonstrated.
In this study, ps-laser micromachining of different types of metals like copper, aluminum, titanium, tungsten and zinc have been investigated. Their single-pulse damage thresholds for the laser wavelengths of 355 nm, 532 nm and 1064 nm were experimentally determined. The laser-induced surface morphology both in the low and high fluence regime, as well as in the transition area, were examined for all investigated metals by scanning electron microscopy. Single pulse experiments and multi-pulse ablation experiments for up to 6 pulses using time-delays between successive pulses of 1 s and 20 ns were carried out. Our observations show that the surface morphologies significantly change from single-pulse ablation to the application of a second pulse. By comparing different separation times in the multi-pulse experiments we show that the burst-mode in ps-laser processing accumulates heat. This results in strong arising melting films, smoothing of the ablation craters and melt splashes outside of the crater. We found out, that copper and aluminum as well as titanium and zinc show similar ablation behavior by using the burst mode.
Carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) as a lightweight material with superior properties is increasingly being used in industrial manufacturing. Using ultrashort laser pulses can improve the quality in cutting or drilling applications, but at high power levels it is more complicated to maintain the accuracy and precision in CFRP drilling. According to the application requirements for the extent of the heat affected zone, the geometric precision and the productivity different drilling tools can be used. Therefore we report on the application of three different beam delivery systems to drilling processes of CFRP: Galvanometer scanner, trepanning head and diffractive optical elements.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.