Abstract
Three-dimensional (3D) printing has allowed for the production of geometrically complex 3D objects with extreme flexibility, which is currently undergoing rapid expansion in terms of materials, functionalities, as well as areas of application. When attempting to print 3D microstructures in glass, femtosecond laser-induced chemical etching (FLICE)—which is a subtractive 3D printing technique—has proved itself a powerful approach. Here, we demonstrate the fabrication of macro-scale 3D glass objects of large heights up to ~3.8 cm with an identical lateral and longitudinal feature size of ~20 μm. The remarkable accomplishment is achieved by revealing an unexplored regime in the interaction of ultrafast laser pulses with fused silica, which results in depth-insensitive focusing of the laser pulses inside fused silica.
Highlights
Thanks to the ultrashort pulse durations, ranging from femtosecond to tens of picoseconds, and the ultrahigh repetition rates, enabling the efficient and high throughput machining of materials, ultrafast lasers nowadays have been widely adopted in fabricating three-dimensional (3D) microstructures in various transparent materials [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
Ultrafast lasers have enabled the fabrication of geometrically complex 3D microstructures in glass for a variety of applications ranging from microfluidics and micro-optics to micromechanics [8,9,10]
Ultrafast laser pulses with sub-ps durations are considered more advantageous than the picosecond laser pulses in terms of the highest achievable spatial resolution as well as energy deposition efficiency, as the shorter the laser pulse durations, the less significant the thermal diffusion and the stronger the interaction of the laser pulses with the materials owing to the enhanced peak intensities [11]
Summary
Thanks to the ultrashort pulse durations, ranging from femtosecond to tens of picoseconds, and the ultrahigh repetition rates, enabling the efficient and high throughput machining of materials, ultrafast lasers nowadays have been widely adopted in fabricating three-dimensional (3D) microstructures in various transparent materials [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. When combining the focusing power of high numerical aperture (NA) lenses and the extreme sensitivity in the response of large bandgap glass materials to laser intensity, the femtosecond laser pulses have enabled the achievement of a nanoscale feature size in both surface and in-volume structuring of glass [12,13].
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