Rapid Cutting and Drilling of Transparent Materials via Femtosecond Laser Filamentation

Microfabrication of transparent materials using femtosecond laser pulses has showed good potential towards industrial application. Maintaining pulse energies above the critical self-focusing limit produced filaments that were used for micromachining purposes. This article demonstrates two different fabrication techniques using femtosecond filaments generated in water which is in contact with the transparent sample. Both methods yielded through holes made in soda-lime and fused silica glass samples which had thickness up to 1 mm. These fabricated holes have an aspect ratio close to 20; moreover, the fabrication time is of the order of tens of seconds.