Product Code: ICAL09_1104

High Pulse Energy (HPE) Picosecond (ps) Laser
Authors:
Joyce Kilmer, Photonics Industries International, Inc.; Bohemia NY USA
Santosh Pisharody, Photonics Industries International, Inc.; Bohemia NY USA
Yusong Yin, Photonics Industries International, Inc.; Bohemia NY USA
Presented at ICALEO 2009

High Pulse Energy (HPE) Picosecond (ps) lasers are effective tools for processing a wide range of materials ranging from brittle samples that exhibit chipping/cracking to metals or composite materials such as the novel thin film solar cell material, Copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS), which suffer thermal deformation from long pulse laser processing. Mechanically machining meso scale dimensions in one axis, but micro scale in the other is traditionally difficult. HPE ps laser enable such "Mesoprocessing" simply by defocusing, as the necessary ablation threshold is reached even when the beam is in the defocused state. Other applications of HPE ps are high accuracy LIDAR and Satellite Laser Ranging. We have developed HPE ps lasers that produce over 3mJ per pulse at kHz repetition rates in pulses shorter than 25 picoseconds.