On the applicability of arbitrarily shaped nanosecond laser pulses for high quality high efficiency micromachining

Progressive developments in temporal shaping of short laser pulses offer entirely new approaches at influence and investigate laser-matter-interactions. Commonly used parameters for describing the behavior of short or ultrashort pulses or pulse trains are fluence and intensity. However, fluence does not imply any information about the temporal behavior of energy input during specific pulse duration tau while using the pulse intensity as describing parameter is more meaningful. Nevertheless it still is an averaging over pulse duration and no change in intensity can be determined if the temporal pulse shape changes within a certain combination of pulse duration and pulse energy. Using a flexible programmable MOPA fiber laser experimental studies on the impact of temporal energy distribution within one single laser pulse in micro machining applications were therefore carried out. With this laser source a direct modulation of the temporal pulse shape in the nanosecond regime can easily be controlled. Experiments were carried out with moved as well as with un-moved beam resulting in areas and dimples respectively drilling holes. The presented results clearly show that any averaging over pulse duration results in missing information about time-dependent interactions but can at the same time lead to significant differences in ablation results. Thus, resulting surface roughness Sa can be decreased up to 25 % when changing the pulse shape at constant parameters of fluence and pulse peak power at a pulse duration of 30 ns. It can be observed that the combination of an intensity peak and a lower edge within one pulse can lead to increasing ablation efficiency as well as higher ablation quality compared to the commonly used Gaussian-like temporal pulse shape.