Quantized structuring of transparent films with femtosecond laser interference

Abstract

The confinement of laser interactions inside transparent materials assisted by tight optical focusing and short-pulsed nonlinear interactions has driven many high-resolution patterning and probing applications in science and technology. In thin transparent films, laser interactions confined to the film/substrate interface have underpinned blistering and ejection processes for nanofluidic channel fabrication, film patterning and cell catapulting. Here, we harness femtosecond lasers to drive nonlinear interactions within Fabry–Perot interference fringes to define narrow nanolength scale zones for highly resolved internal structuring of a film of refractive index, nfilm, at fringe maxima separated by λ/2nfilm. This novel interaction internally cleaves the film to open subwavelength internal cavities and form thin membranes at single or multiple depths from which follow significant opportunities for writing multilevel nanofluidic channels inside the film, as well as ejecting nanodisks at quantized film depths for coloring and three-dimensional surface patterning that promise new compact types of lab-in-film devices. High-resolution structuring of thin transparent films using a femtosecond laser can aid the fabrication of various devices. Kitty Kumar and co-workers from the University of Toronto in Canada say that interference from reflections at the film’s boundaries causes the laser light to create a series of periodic plasma disks in the dielectric film that eject material. The resulting laser-generated nanovoids could be useful for fabricating miniature cavities and fluidic waveguides or performing nanoscale texturing to improve light harvesting in solar cells or light extraction from LEDs. The researchers tested their scheme with a stream of 200 fs pulses from a 522 nm frequency-doubled fibre laser operating at a repetition rate of 100 kHz. They focused the pulses onto an SiNx film measuring 20–1,545 nm thick.