Direct machining of curved trenches in silicon with femtosecond accelerating beams

Control of the longitudinal profile of ablated structures during laser processing is a key technological requirement. We report here on the direct machining of trenches in silicon with circular profiles using femtosecond accelerating beams. We describe the ablation process based on an intensity threshold model, and show how the depth of the trenches can be predicted in the framework of a caustic description of the beam.

[1]  Wiktor Walasik,et al.  Accelerating light beams along arbitrary convex trajectories. , 2011, Physical review letters.

[2]  Mohammad-Ali Miri,et al.  Fully vectorial accelerating diffraction-free Helmholtz beams. , 2012, Physical review letters.

[3]  Maxime Jacquot,et al.  High aspect ratio nanochannel machining using single shot femtosecond Bessel beams , 2010 .

[4]  F. Courvoisier,et al.  Sending femtosecond pulses in circles: highly nonparaxial accelerating beams. , 2012, Optics letters.

[5]  Luc Froehly,et al.  Micromachining along a curve: Femtosecond laser micromachining of curved profiles in diamond and silicon using accelerating beams , 2012 .

[6]  A Dogariu,et al.  Observation of accelerating Airy beams. , 2007, Physical review letters.

[7]  M. Bandres,et al.  Spherical fields as nonparaxial accelerating waves. , 2012, Optics letters.

[8]  M J Withford,et al.  High aspect ratio taper-free microchannel fabrication using femtosecond Bessel beams. , 2010, Optics express.

[9]  Jörg Baumgartl,et al.  Optically mediated particle clearing using Airy wavepackets , 2008 .

[10]  Mordechai Segev,et al.  Nondiffracting accelerating wave packets of Maxwell's equations. , 2012, Physical review letters.

[11]  Miroslav Kolesik,et al.  Curved Plasma Channel Generation Using Ultraintense Airy Beams , 2009, Science.

[12]  L Froehly,et al.  Arbitrary accelerating micron-scale caustic beams in two and three dimensions. , 2011, Optics express.

[13]  Roberto Morandotti,et al.  Nonparaxial Mathieu and Weber accelerating beams. , 2012, Physical review letters.

[14]  Harold K. Haugen,et al.  Femtosecond laser micromachining of grooves in silicon with 800 nm pulses , 2005 .

[15]  L Furfaro,et al.  Surface nanoprocessing with nondiffracting femtosecond Bessel beams. , 2009, Optics letters.

[16]  Ehud Heyman,et al.  Nonparaxial wave analysis of three-dimensional Airy beams. , 2011, Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision.

[17]  M. Bandres,et al.  Accelerating beams. , 2009, Optics letters.

[18]  D. Christodoulides,et al.  Abruptly autofocusing and autodefocusing optical beams with arbitrary caustics , 2012 .