Effect of fs laser exposure on the strength of toughened multimedia glass

Abstract Femtosecond laser written waveguides have been previously proposed as potential compact photonic devices in multimedia glass covers. The structural modification induced by laser irradiation may however affect the mechanical strength of this protective glass layer. Therefore, the impact of such femtosecond laser radiation on the mechanical strength of toughened multimedia to determine if inclusion of photonics structures into this glass is suitable, is investigated in this work. Inscriptions written using a 250 fs laser center at 515 nm at different writing speeds (1–300 mm/s), pulse energy (0.495 to 1.32 μJ), density (number) of inscriptions (up to 50) and depth of the inscriptions (20 to 200 μm) from the surface, were submitted to Weibull analysis and the two-parameters Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test. No degradation between a set of pristine and fs inscribed samples were observed showing that femtosecond laser inscription inside this type of glass does not alter its mechanical properties significantly.