High-efficiency laser milling by bursts of ultrashort (fs-ps) light pulses (Conference Presentation)

Ultrashort laser pulses are already widely used in material processing due to high flexibility and precision. However, competition in industrial applications demands growth of processing efficiency every year. In our previous works, the laser ablation efficiency versus various conventional processing parameters like laser fluence, beam scanning speed, pulse repetition rate and hatch distance was studied and beam-size-optimization was introduced. Also burst mode processing was applied, since it attracted a lot of attention by scientific and technological communities. The purpose of our current work was to investigate the real advantage of the burst regime by comparing the beam-size-optimized single-pulse regime with the beam-size-optimized multiple-pulse burst regime, which was never previously demonstrated. The optimization was done by increasing the spot size to find the maximum ablation efficiency for various pulse numbers per burst and various pulse durations.