Abstract
Tailored intensity profiles within the focal spot of the laser beam offer great potential for a well-defined control of the interaction process between laser radiation and material, and thus for improving the processing results. The present paper discusses a novel refractive beam-shaping element that provides different squared intensity distributions converted from the Gaussian output beam of the utilized femtosecond (fs) laser. Using the examples of surface structuring of stainless-steel on the micro- and nano-scale, the suitability of the beam-shaping element for fs-laser material processing with a conventional f-Theta lens is demonstrated. In this context, it was shown that the experimental structuring results are in good agreement with beam profile measurements and numerical simulations of the beam-shaping unit. In addition, the experimental results reveal the improvement of laser processing in terms of a significantly reduced processing time during surface nano-structuring and the possibility to control the ablation geometry during the fabrication of micro-channels.
Highlights
In modern laser material processing, beam shaping is receiving growing attention, as it allows the focal intensity distribution to be adjusted to the interaction process between the laser radiation and the material [1,2,3]
The first part of the experiments was to investigate whether the theoretical calculations for the focal intensity distribution correlate with the geometry of the ablated region within the focal spot on the material surface
The surface was irradiated with 10 single fs-laser pulses with a temporal pulse spacing of 10 μs and a single-pulse energy of Eimp = 6.5 μJ
Summary
The range of achievable types of structures is extended [4,5,6]
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