Abstract

Femtosecond laser damage and ablation of wide band gap materials is an important and active research area, having significant advantages in fundamental science and engineering industry. In dielectrics, the nonlinear character of absorption offers the additional advantage to release the laser energy in a sub-micrometric volume (< 3, with  the laser wavelength), and with the possibility to control accurately the amount of deposited energy [1. In particular, the knowledge of laser absorption in the machined material and further relaxation of the absorbed energy is of paramount interest for fundamental investigations and clarifications, and the development of optimized laser micromachining processes. A comprehensive experimental and theoretical study allowing femtosecond laser users to determine by a simple approach the required working fluences to achieve a clean, controlled and efficient removal of matter at the micrometre scale at the surface of a dielectric material is presented and also a guideline for the development of optimized micromachining applications.

© 2015 Optical Society of America