Micro drilling using deformable mirror for beam shaping of ultra-short laser pulses

Using ultra-short laser pulses for micro structuring or drilling applications reduces the thermal influence to the surrounding material. The best achievable beam profile equals a Gaussian beam. Drilling with this beam profile results in cylindrical holes. To vary the shape of the holes, the beam can either be scanned or - for single pulse and percussion drilling - manipulated by masks or lenses. A high flexible method for beam shaping can be realized by using a deformable mirror. This mirror contains a piezo-electric ceramic, which can be deformed by an electric potential. By separating the ceramic into independent controllable segments, the shape of the surface can be varied individually. Due to the closed surface of the mirror, there is no loss of intensity due to diffraction. The mirror deformation is controlled by Zernike polynomials and results e.g. in a lens behavior. In this study a deformable mirror was used to generate e.g. slits in thin steel foils by percussion drilling using ultra-short laser pulses. The influence of the cylindrical deformation to the laser beam and the resulting geometry of the generated holes was studied. It was demonstrated that due to the high update rate up to 150 Hz the mirror surface can be varied in each scan cycle, which results in a high flexible drilling process.