All-purpose glasses are common in many established and emerging industries, such as microelectronics, photovoltaics, optical components, and biomedical devices due to their outstanding combination of mechanical, optical, thermal, and chemical properties. Surface functionalization through nano/micropatterning can further enhance glasses’ surface properties, expanding their applicability into new fields. Although laser structuring methods have been successfully employed on many absorbing materials, the processability of transparent materials with visible laser radiation has not been intensively studied, especially for producing structures smaller than 10 µm. Here, interference-based optical setups are used to directly pattern soda lime substrates through non-lineal absorption with ps-pulsed laser radiation in the visible spectrum. Line- and dot-like patterns are fabricated with spatial periods between 2.3 and 9.0 µm and aspect ratios up to 0.29. Furthermore, laser-induced periodic surface structures (LIPSS) with a feature size of approximately 300 nm are visible within these microstructures. The textured surfaces show significantly modified properties. Namely, the treated surfaces have an increased hydrophilic behavior, even reaching a super-hydrophilic state for some cases. In addition, the micropatterns act as relief diffraction gratings, which split incident light into diffraction modes. The process parameters were optimized to produce high-quality textures with super-hydrophilic properties and diffraction efficiencies above 30%.
Glass is one of the most important technical surfaces for numerous applications in automotive, optical, and consumer industries. In addition, by producing textured surfaces with periodic features in the micrometre range, new functions can be created. Although laser-based methods have shown to be capable to produce structured materials in a wide amount of materials, due to its transparency large bandgap dielectrics can be only processed in a controlled manner by employing high-power ultra-short pulsed lasers, thus limiting the employable laser sources. In this article, an interference-based method for the texturing of soda-lime glass using a 15 ns pulsed (1 kHz repetition rate) infrared (1053 nm) laser is proposed, which allows fabricating different periodic patterns with micrometre resolution. This method consists on irradiating a metallic absorber (stainless steel) put in direct contact with the glass sample and inducing locally an etching process on the backside of the glass. Then, the produced plasma at the interference maxima positions leads to the local fabrication of well-defined periodic line-like and dot-like surface patterns. The produced patterns are characterised using white light interferometry and scanning electron microscopy.
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