International audienc

We report on crater formation, line scribing and cavity milling experiments on Silicon, Copper, Aluminum and stainless steel with GHz bursts of femtosecond pulses. The intra-burst repetition rate has been varied between 0.88 and 3.52 GHz, the number of pulses per burst between 50 and 3200, the burst fluence between 8 and 80 J/cm2. For these experiments, a 100-W femtosecond GHz-burst laser has been developed on an industrial laser basis, delivering a total burst energy up to 1 mJ at 100 kHz, with an adjustable number of pulses per burst. The results highlight the conditions to obtain high-ablation efficiency, show how to optimize the machining quality and point out the burst duration as the relevant parameter for femtosecond GHz machining.

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The authors report on a simple and easy-to-use GHz amplified femtosecond laser source. The laser source is based on a passively mode-locked oscillator with a near GHz repetition rate. GHz pulses are then selected, and the obtained bursts of pulses are further amplified in a high-power amplifier chain. The presented GHz femtosecond laser source is used with a galvanometric scanner to perform ablation experiments on copper, aluminum, and stainless steel. Specific ablation rates of 0.7, 2.3, and 1.4 (mm3/min)/W are reached. The role of the important experimental parameters, such as the number of subpulses in the burst, is highlighted. Thanks to a specific ablation scheme in the GHz mode, the ablation efficiency is then comparable to the case of single nanosecond pulses, but with the usual quality of femtosecond processing.