Pulsetrain-burst machining has been shown to have advantages over single-pulse laser processing of materials and biological tissues. Ultrafast lasers are often able to drill holes in brittle and other difficult materials without cracking or swelling the target material, as is sometimes the case for nanosecond-pulse ablation; further, pulsetrain-bursts of ultrafast pulses are able to recondition the material during processing for instance, making brittle materials more ductile and striking advantages can result. In the work we report, we have investigated hole-drilling characteristics in metal and glass, using a Nd:glass pulsetrain-burst laser (1054 nm) delivering 1-10 ps pulses at 133 MHz, with trains 3-15 μs long. We show that as the beam propagates down the channel being drilled, the beam loses transverse coherence, and that this affects the etch-rate and characteristics of channel shape: as the original Gaussian beam travels into the channel, new boundary conditions are imposed on the propagating beam principally the boundary conditions of a cylindrical channel, and also the effects of plasma generated at the walls as the aluminum is ablated. As a result, the beam will decompose over the dispersive waveguide modes, and this will affect the transverse coherence of the beam as it propagates, ultimately limiting the maximum depth that laser-etching can reach. To measure transverse beam coherence, we use a Youngs two-slit interference setup. By measuring the fringe visibility for various slit separations, we can extract the transverse coherence as a function of displacement across the beam. However, this requires many data runs for different slit separations. Our solution to this problem is a novel approach to transverse coherence measurements: a modified Michelson interferometer. Flipping the beam left-right on one arm, we can interfere the beam with its own mirror-image and characterise the transverse coherence across the beam in a single shot.

Date Published: 8 September 2006
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 6343, Photonics North 2006, 63432A (8 September 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.707967

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6343:
Photonics North 2006
Pierre Mathieu, Editor(s)