Femtosecond laser machining

Summary form only given. The use of femtosecond lasers allows materials processing of practically any material with extremely high precision and minimal collateral damage. Advantages over conventional laser machining (using pulses longer than a few tens of picoseconds) are realized by depositing the laser energy into the electrons of the material on a time scale short compared to the transfer time of this energy to the bulk of the material, resulting in increased ablation efficiency and negligible shock or thermal stress. Using a 4-W Ti:sapphire CPA laser, we produced cuts and holes in several explosives for a variety of laser parameters with no observable impact on the remaining material.