Femtosecond laser interference technique with diffractive beam splitter for fabrication of three-dimensional photonic crystals

A simple optical interference method to fabricate microperiodic structures was demonstrated. Femtosecond laser pulse was split by a diffractive beam splitter and overlapped with two lenses. Temporal overlap of the split femtosecond pulses, which requires 10 mum order accuracy in optical path lengths, was automatically achieved by this optical setup. One-, two-, and three-dimensional periodic microstructures with micrometer-order periods were fabricated using this method. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.