Processing of Industrially Relevant Non Metals with Laser Pulses in the Range Between 10Ps and 50Ps

The interest in ps-laser pulses for industrial applications has significantly increased in the last few years. Today, available ps-lasers are industrially applicable turnkey systems, set up in a MOPA arrangement with rod or disk amplifiers and mostly have pulse durations of about 10ps. The change to fiber based amplifier technologies would help to build more compact systems but with pulse durations between 20ps and 50ps. It has been shown, that the ablation efficiency of a material is mainly given by the threshold fluence and the energy penetration depth. For steel and copper both parameters depend on the number of pulses applied and the pulse duration as well. Unfortunately this influence will lead to a significant drop of the ablation efficiency and quality if the pulse duration rises from 10ps to 50ps. This behavior, also expected for other metals, may reduce the attractiveness of the fiber based systems by having to make use of stretcher power amplifier compressor designs to achieve shorter pulses. However, for industrially relevant non-metals like polycrystalline diamond or ceramic materials the situation is unclear. New results of a systematic study about the influence of the pulse duration onto the ablation efficiency and quality will be presented.