Hard-tissue drilling by short-pulse CO2 laser with controllable pulse-tail energy

We developed a longitudinally excited CO2 laser that produces a short laser pulse with the almost same spike-pulse energy of about 0.8 mJ and the controllable pulse-tail energy of 0-21.26 mJ. The laser was very simple and consisted of a 45-cm-long alumina ceramic pipe with an inner diameter of 9 mm, a pulse power supply, a step-up transformer, a storage capacitance and a spark-gap switch. In single-shot irradiation using these laser pulses, the dependence of the drilling depth of dry ivory samples on the fluence was investigated. The drilling depth increased with the fluence in the same laser pulse waveform. In this work, the effective short laser pulse for the hard tissue drilling was the laser pulse with the spike pulse energy of 0.87 mJ and the pulse tail energy of 6.33 mJ that produced the drilling depth of 28.1 μm at the fluence of 3.48 J/cm2 and the drilling depth per the fluence of 7.27 μm/J/cm2.