Towards Large Area Submicron Surface Texturing by Femtosecond Laser Irradiation of Microparticle Arrays

Results of the work in the Laser4Fun project has been published as:

Jean-Michel Romano, Rajib Ahmed, Antonio Garcia-Giron, Pavel Penchev, Olivier Dellea, Stefan Dimov. Towards Large Area Submicron Surface Texturing by Femtosecond Laser Irradiation of Microparticle Arrays. 2nd World Congress on Micro and Nano Manufacturing (September 2018); doi: 10.3850/978-981-11-2728-1_10

Abstract

The direct laser submicron texturing of X6Cr17 stainless steel plates is reported. A hexagonal close-packed monolayer of 1um transparent silica microspheres deposited onto the metallic surface was irradiated with near-infrared femtosecond laser source to generate an array of Photonic Jets (PJ). The PJ intensity profiles were calculated by simulation. PJ full width at half maximum was estimated to be ~500nm on the surface. The influence of pulse energy and focal offset on material removal and microspheres’ ejection was studied. Different 1um-periodic submicron topographies were fabricated by a single-shot irradiation, i.e. ranging from 30nm-height bumps to 200nm-to-1um diameter holes. Consecutive multi pulse processing generated triangular laser-induced surfaces structures (LIPSS). In addition, the dry laser cleaning effect and large area texturing employing PJ were investigated.