Ultra high-speed micromachining of transparent materials using high PRF ultrafast lasers and new resonant scanning systems

Irradiation of focused laser pulses to transparent materials leads to structural changes and can be used for the fabrication of e.g. LED light guiding components. In these applications both small spot sizes and a high lateral resolution in the μm range are absolutely essential. In order to achieve the industrially required throughput of nearly one million laser markings per second, ultrafast lasers with 100 W of average power and pulse repetition frequencies of several MHz are required. Laser machining of polymers additionally necessitates a wide spatial separation of the markings to avoid heat accumulation effects. Therefore, neither commercially available galvanometer based nor Polygon based scanners with their limited scan speed can be used for beam deflection. In our work, we developed an experimental setup based