Femtosecond laser ablation and nanostructuring

At the Laser Zentrum Hannover investigations of possibilities to use femtosecond laser pulses for direct ablative writing and microstructuring of solid materials have been started in 1995. Since then considerable progress in understanding and in the application of different femtosecond technologies has been obtained. At present, we are able to produce high quality microstructuring and large area patterning of solids with structure sizes between one. and ten micrometers. By using tightly focused femtosecond pulses it is possible to produce even sub-micrometer structures. In this paper we pursue the goal to find and characterize the limits of femtosecond laser micromachining. Detailed investigations of possibilities to use femtosecond lasers for the sub-wavelength microstructuring of metals and for fabrication of periodic structures in transparent materials with the scale length of the order of several hundreds nanometers are reported.