Structured light for ultrafast laser micro- and nanoprocessing

Abstract

The industrial maturity of ultrashort pulsed lasers has triggered the development of a plethora of material processing strategies. Recently, the combination of these remarkable temporal pulse properties with advanced structured light concepts has led to breakthroughs in the development of novel laser application methods, which will now gradually reach industrial environments. We review the efficient generation of customized focus distributions from the near infrared down to the deep ultraviolet, e.g., based on non-diffracting beams and 3D-beam splitters, and demonstrate their impact for micro- and nanomachining of a wide range of materials. In the beam shaping concepts presented, special attention was paid to suitability for both high energies and high powers.

Accepted manuscript, 19 pages, 20 figures and 111 references

References in corpus (5)

• 3.5 kW coherently combined ultrafast fiber laser
• Coherent beam combining with micro-lens arrays
• Improving the beam quality factor ($M^2$) by phase-only reshaping of structured light
• Generalized axicon-based generation of nondiffracting beams
• High power, electronically-controlled, source of user-defined vortex and vector light beams based on a few-mode fibre amplifier