Product Code: ICAL09_M301

Laser Internal Modification plus Wet Etching for Micro-structuring Crystalline and Glassy Materials (Invited Presentation, 40 minutes)
Authors:
Shigeki Matsuo, The University of Tokushima; Tokushima Japan
Presented at ICALEO 2009

Thanks to the recent progress in femtosecond (fs) laser technology, now fs laser is regarded as a powerful tool for micro/nano processing of materials. We apply fs lasers to three-dimensional (3D) removal processing inside transparent solid. The procedure of this processing consists of two steps. The first step is irradiation of focused fs pulses, which results in a modification of host material in the vicinity of the focus. By moving the sample, modified spots are fabricated along the pre-designed pattern. The second step is wet etching. If the modified region is more soluble than the un-modified host material, the modified region is selectively etched out and empty space is fabricated from the surface to the inside of the sample. Because we can fabricate modified spots at arbitrary positions, this removal processing inherently has a 3D capability in fabricating microchannels and microcavities. We have developed this processing technique for crystalline materials of quartz and sapphire, as well as silica and borosilicate glasses. We report recent progress of this technique. In addition, we show non-contact manipulation and rotation of internal movable structures ("ship-in-a-bottle" structures) fabricated by this technique.