Ultrafast laser processing of materials: from science to industry

“…This absorption process generally adheres to Lambert-Beer's law, facilitating the attainment of a state of local thermodynamic equilibrium within the material. Consequently, the energy absorption and diffusion processes in metals under ultrafast laser irradiation predominantly involve linear absorption and manifest as steady-state heating [111]. This behavior aligns more closely with the interaction dynamics observed when longpulsed lasers interact with metals, even we can consider the difference in cooling dynamics formed by ultrafast laser or long-pulsed laser irradiation to be negligible [87].…”

“…Among possible applications of interest one can quote, for example, the mitigation of secondary electron yield for copper screen for particles accelerator colliders [ 33 , 34 ], the development of Cu-based substrates plasmonic sensors for biosensing and antibacterial applications [ 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 ], the elaboration of surfaces with peculiar wetting features [ 41 , 47 ], and so forth. Our results also address how spatially shaped beams can add further flexibility to fs laser processing, even by a simple change of the focusing lens, besides the more complex approaches based on complex beam shaping and spatially variant polarization illustrated in previous publications [ 3 , 6 , 11 , 12 , 48 ].…”

“…26 However, in the case of ultrafast laser sources, because of the high intensity (TW∕cm 2 and more) of the light source induced nonlinear light-matter interactions, basically all materials can be processed with high precision 27 in both subtractive and additive fashion. 5 For instance, in the case of presented results, the intensity needed for polymerization was around 0.525 TW∕cm 2 (additive process), while it was 196 TW∕cm 2 during ablation (subtractive fabrication). Furthermore, tunning of the pulse repetition rate allows switching between light-matter regimes.…”