Processing of materials by ultrashort laser pulses has evolved significantly over the last decade and is starting to reveal its scientific, technological and industrial potential. In ultrafast laser manufacturing, optical energy of tightly focused femtosecond or picosecond laser pulses can be delivered to precisely defined positions in the bulk of materials via two-/multi-photon excitation on a timescale much faster than thermal energy exchange between photoexcited electrons and lattice ions. Control of photo-ionization and thermal processes with the highest precision, inducing local photomodification in sub-100-nm-sized regions has been achieved. State-of-the-art ultrashort laser processing techniques exploit high 0.1–1 μm spatial resolution and almost unrestricted three-dimensional structuring capability. Adjustable pulse duration, spatiotemporal chirp, phase front tilt and polarization allow control of photomodification via uniquely wide parameter space. Mature opto-electrical/mechanical technologies have enabled laser processing speeds approaching meters-per-second, leading to a fast lab-to-fab transfer. The key aspects and latest achievements are reviewed with an emphasis on the fundamental relation between spatial resolution and total fabrication throughput. Emerging biomedical applications implementing micrometer feature precision over centimeter-scale scaffolds and photonic wire bonding in telecommunications are highlighted.

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Ultrafast laser processing of materials: from science to industry

본 연구는 현존하는 여덟 개의 〈뿔피리를 부는 제빵사〉 작품이 산발적으로 우연히 등장한 것이 아닌 서로 유기적인 영향관계를 주고 받으며 생산된 하나의 도상으로 살펴보았다. “뿔피리를 부는 제빵사” 그림에 대한 현재까지의 연구는 대부분 그림에 나타나 있는 다양한 빵들을 성만찬을 의미하는 종교적 상징으로 해석하고 있다. 이에 반해 본 연구는 “뿔피리를 부는 제빵사” 도상이 유독 17세기 중후반 네덜란드에서 생산된 사실에 주목하고, 그 이유를 동시대 네덜란드인들의 일상에 직접적인 영향을 주었던 빵의 생산 및 공급 그리고 유통과정에서 찾고자 한다. 여기에는 빵이 당대 네덜란드인들의 식생활 뿐 아니라 그들의 경제생활 더나아가 국가경제 전체에 어떤 중요한 역할을 했는지에 대한 연구가 선행되어야 한다. 주로 풍속화의 전통으로 해석되었던 “뿔피리를 부는 제빵사” 그림은 본 연구에서 풍속화와 초상화 두 장르가 혼합한 도상으로 다루어졌으며, 이제까지의 연구에서 미흡했던 초상화로서의 가능성이 적극적으로 제기되었다. 제빵사의 초상화 또는 화가의 자화상으로 생산된 〈뿔피리를 부는 제빵사〉의 시대적 배경에는 제빵사의 경제적 여유와 사회적 지위상승 그리고 제빵사를 영혼의 양식을 공급하는 고귀한 직업으로 승화시킨 칼비니즘의 영향이 있다. 제빵사들이 부를 축적할 수 있었던 배경에는 국가가 나서서 빵의 생산과 공급을 철저하게 관리해준 덕분이었다. 17세기 네덜란드의 제빵사들은 길드에 속해야만 빵을 팔 수 있었고 각 제빵사들의 빵 만드는 법은 외부인들에게 절대로 공개되지 않았다. 동시에 당시 네덜란드인들은 세금을 내지 않고는 빵을 먹기가 힘들었다. 이런 이유로 개인의 집에 오븐을 설치하는 것은 금지되었고, 빵은 꼭 관헌들에게 세금을 내는 합법적인 제빵사에게서만 살 수 있었다. 이렇게 17세기 네덜란드는 직업으로서 빵 굽는 사람을 보호하는 동시에 단속하기 위해 매우 엄격한 규정을 제정하였다. 17세기 네덜란드인들에게 빵은 그들의 식생활 뿐 아니라 그들의 다양한 직업과도 관련이 있었으며 빵의 생산과 유통과정에 개입한 국가의 권위와 통제를 상징하기도 한다. 빵의 생산과 유통에 붙는 세금은 국가의 경제를 지탱하고 발전시키는데 중요한 재원이었으며, 동시에 국민들을 엄격하게 관리함으로써 국가의 질서를 세우기 위한 효과적인 방편이었다. 빵가격은 변동이 심한 곡물가격과 빵의 크기에 따라서 엄격하게 결정되었다. 네덜란드정부는 평상시에 빵의 공식적인 무게와 가격을 고정시켰는데, 이는 다른 음식에서는 찾아볼 수 없는 유일한 관리방식이었다. 따라서 동시대 네덜란드인들에게 빵은 국가의 적극적인 개입과 관리체계를 통해서만 그들의 입에 넣을 수 있는 음식이었다. 이러한 맥락에서 볼 때, 본 연구에서 다룬 〈뿔피리를 부는 제빵사〉 그림에서 풍성하게 차려진 다양한 빵은 경제적인 풍요와 정치적인 안정을 의미한다. 여러 가지 다양한 음식 중에서도 빵이 이러한 의미를 가장 효과적으로 전달한다는 점에서 〈뿔피리를 부는 제빵사〉 그림에서 빵은 당시 네덜란드의 물질적 풍요뿐만 아니라 국가의 번영과 안녕을 의미한다고 볼 수 있다.

17세기 네덜란드 미술에 나타난 빵의 사회사

During femtosecond laser fabrication, photons are mainly absorbed by electrons, and the subsequent energy transfer from electrons to ions is of picosecond order. Hence, lattice motion is negligible within the femtosecond pulse duration, whereas femtosecond photon-electron interactions dominate the entire fabrication process. Therefore, femtosecond laser fabrication must be improved by controlling localized transient electron dynamics, which poses a challenge for measuring and controlling at the electron level during fabrication processes. Pump-probe spectroscopy presents a viable solution, which can be used to observe electron dynamics during a chemical reaction. In fact, femtosecond pulse durations are shorter than many physical/chemical characteristic times, which permits manipulating, adjusting, or interfering with electron dynamics. Hence, we proposed to control localized transient electron dynamics by temporally or spatially shaping femtosecond pulses, and further to modify localized transient materials properties, and then to adjust material phase change, and eventually to implement a novel fabrication method. This review covers our progresses over the past decade regarding electrons dynamics control (EDC) by shaping femtosecond laser pulses in micro/nanomanufacturing: (1) Theoretical models were developed to prove EDC feasibility and reveal its mechanisms; (2) on the basis of the theoretical predictions, many experiments are conducted to validate our EDC-based femtosecond laser fabrication method. Seven examples are reported, which proves that the proposed method can significantly improve fabrication precision, quality, throughput and repeatability and effectively control micro/nanoscale structures; (3) a multiscale measurement system was proposed and developed to study the fundamentals of EDC from the femtosecond scale to the nanosecond scale and to the millisecond scale; and (4) As an example of practical applications, our method was employed to fabricate some key structures in one of the 16 Chinese National S&T Major Projects, for which electron dynamics were measured using our multiscale measurement system.

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Electrons dynamics control by shaping femtosecond laser pulses in micro/nanofabrication: modeling, method, measurement and application

Fabrication technology for three-dimensional microstructures with submicrometer accuracy has been needed in the fields of modern optics, such as micro mechanical system driven with photon pressure[1, 2] and laser-trapping near-filed optical microscopy[3]. However, the present accuracy with stereolithography[4] is not yet satisfactory to this purpose. Moreover, it is not so flexible to make a three- dimensional structure with the present technique. In this paper, we propose a new microfabrication method in which a point in three-dimensional volume of UV photopolymerizing resin is photopolymerized through two-photon absorption process. The microfabrication with two-photon absorption drastically improves the depth resolution due to a nonlinearlity between the power of the irradiation and that of the absorption[5].

Three-dimensional microfabrication with two-photon absorbed photopolymerization

Femtosecond laser induced phenomena in transparent solid materials: Fundamentals and applications

The lab-on-chip (LOC) platform has presented a powerful opportunity to improve functionalization, parallelization, and miniaturization on planar or multilevel geometries that has not been possible with fiber optic technology. A migration of such LOC devices into the optical fiber platform would therefore open the revolutionary prospect of creating novel lab-in-fiber (LIF) systems on the basis of an efficient optical transport highway for multifunctional sensing. For the LIF, the core optical waveguide inherently offers a facile means to interconnect numerous types of sensing elements along the optical fiber, presenting a radical opportunity for optimizing the packaging and densification of diverse components in convenient geometries beyond that available with conventional LOCs. In this paper, three-dimensional patterning inside the optical fiber by femtosecond laser writing, together with selective chemical etching, is presented as a powerful tool to form refractive index structures such as optical waveguides and gratings as well as to open buried microfluidic channels and optical resonators inside the flexible and robust glass fiber. In this approach, optically smooth surfaces (~12 nm rms) are introduced for the first time inside the fiber cladding that precisely conform to planar nanograting structures when formed by aberration-free focusing with an oil-immersion lens across the cylindrical fiber wall. This process has enabled optofluidic components to be precisely embedded within the fiber to be probed by either the single-mode fiber core waveguide or the laser-formed optical circuits. We establish cladding waveguides, X-couplers, fiber Bragg gratings, microholes, mirrors, optofluidic resonators, and microfluidic reservoirs that define the building blocks for facile interconnection of inline core-waveguide devices with cladding optofluidics. With these components, more advanced, integrated, and multiplexed fiber microsystems are presented demonstrating fluorescence detection, Fabry–Perot interferometric refractometry, and simultaneous sensing of refractive index, temperature, and bending strain. The flexible writing technique and multiplexed sensors described here open powerful prospects to migrate the benefits of LOCs into a more flexible and miniature LIF platform for highly functional and distributed sensing capabilities. The waveguide backbone of the LIF inherently provides an efficient exchange of information, combining sensing data that are attractive in telecom networks, smart catheters for medical procedures, compact sensors for security and defense, shape sensors, and low-cost health care products.

Chemical-assisted femtosecond laser writing of lab-in-fibers.

Temperature-compensated 3D fiber shape sensing is demonstrated with femtosecond laser direct-written optical and Bragg grating waveguides that were distributed axially and radially inside a single coreless optical fiber. Efficient light coupling between the laser-written optical circuit elements and a standard single-mode fiber (SMF) was obtained for the first time by 3D laser writing of a 1 × 3 directional coupler to meet with the core waveguide in the fusion-spliced SMF. Simultaneous interrogation of nine Bragg gratings, distributed along three laterally offset waveguides, is presented through a single waveguide port at 1 kHz sampling rate to follow the Bragg wavelength shifts in real-time and thereby infer shape and temperature profile unambiguously along the fiber length. This distributed 3D strain and thermal sensor is freestanding, flexible, compact, lightweight and opens new directions for creating fiber cladding photonic devices for a wide range of applications from shape and thermal sensing to guidance of biomedical catheters and tools in minimally invasive surgery.

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Temperature-compensated fiber-optic 3D shape sensor based on femtosecond laser direct-written Bragg grating waveguides

We present a novel multi-level diffractive optical element for diffractive optic near-field lithography based fabrication of large-area diamond-like photonic crystal structure in a single laser exposure step A multi-level single-surface phase element was laser fabricated on a thin polymer film by two-photon polymerization A quarter-period phase shift was designed into the phase elements to generate a 3D periodic intensity distribution of double basis diamond-like structure Finite difference time domain calculation of near-field diffraction patterns and associated isointensity surfaces are corroborated by definitive demonstration of a diamond-like woodpile structure formed inside thick photoresist A large number of layers provided a strong stopband in the telecom band that matched predictions of numerical band calculation SEM and spectral observations indicate good structural uniformity over large exposure area that promises 3D photonic crystal devices with high optical quality for a wide range of motif shapes and symmetries Optical sensing is demonstrated by spectral shifts of the Γ-Z stopband under liquid emersion

https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/92916/1/Multi-level%20diffractive_TSpace.pdf

Multi-level diffractive optics for single laser exposure fabrication of telecom-band diamond-like 3-dimensional photonic crystals.

A new beam delivery method is introduced for controlling filament formation in optical fiber that enables point-by-point writing of 1st order fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) with single femtosecond laser pulses. Uniform filament tracks with azimuthal symmetry were formed fully through the 9.3 µm core waveguide by a modified immersion focusing method to eliminate astigmatism by the cylindrical fiber shape. Filament arrays were precisely assembled inside of single-mode fiber, generating strong FBG resonances in the telecommunication band. Laser exposure control within this unique thin-grating geometry were key to manipulating the relative strength of the Bragg and cladding mode resonances while also independently tailoring their spectral resolution and features. This filament-by-filament writing rapidly forms gratings with highly flexible pattern control to tune wavelength, or introduce optical defects, demonstrated by a π-shifted FBG having a sharp 25 pm resonance embedded within a broader Bragg peak.

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Femtosecond laser filaments for rapid and flexible writing of fiber Bragg grating

Three-dimensional inverted-woodpile (WP) structures were embedded in a microchannel by femtosecond laser direct-writing of fused silica followed by chemical etching with diluted hydrofluoric acid. We show the hole size is linearly dependent on laser-scanning depth for various pulse energies, permitting the control of laser exposures to facilitate close 5 µm periodic packing of uniform microcapillary arrays. Exposure compensation for depth-dependent etching rate and optical beam aberrations yielded stable and crack-free uniform inverted-WP structures. The direct formation of the inverted-WP structure together with microchannels in an all-fused silica substrate, offers chemical stability and inertness, and biocompatibility to be exploited as new microfluidic systems for chromatography and electro-osmotic pumps.

Moez Haque

Papers

Chemical-assisted femtosecond laser writing of lab-in-fibers.

Temperature-compensated fiber-optic 3D shape sensor based on femtosecond laser direct-written Bragg grating waveguides

Multi-level diffractive optics for single laser exposure fabrication of telecom-band diamond-like 3-dimensional photonic crystals.

Femtosecond laser filaments for rapid and flexible writing of fiber Bragg grating

Femtosecond laser-assisted etching of three-dimensional inverted-woodpile structures in fused silica