Surface Structuring

Abstract

Several industrial applications use nanosecond laser pulses for micro-structuring of surfaces on macroscopic workpieces. The quality of the resulting structures, however, is limited due to the formation of recast that has to be removed by additional postprocessing. Experimental results presented here show that it is possible to avoid melt formation by shortening the pulse duration into the picosecond regime if low energy density values are used. The resulting ablation rates are not satisfactory in most applications but can be increased by using laser systems with a higher repetition rate.