Materials processing with tightly focused femtosecond vortex laser beams

Abstract

This letter is the first demonstration of material modification using tightly focused femtosecond laser vortex beams. Double-charge femtosecond vortices were synthesized with the polarization-singularity beam converter described in Ref [1] and then focused using moderate and high numerical aperture optics (viz., NA = 0.45 and 0.9) to ablate fused silica and soda-lime glasses. By controlling the pulse energy we consistently machine high-quality micron-size ring-shaped structures with less than 100 nm uniform groove thickness.

8 pages, 3 figures, 10 references; submitted to Appl. Phys. Lett. on May 31, 2010

References in corpus (1)

• Efficient Beam Converter for the Generation of Femtosecond Vortices

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Constraints on the detection of topological charge of optical vortices using self-reference interferometry