Direct writing of 40-nm features inside fused silica glass with oscillator ultrafast lasers

Abstract

With ultra-fast oscillator lasers (less than 1nJ/pulse, 80MHz repetition rate), we propose that we could fabricate features with less than 40nm inside UV transparent material such as fused silica and quartz. The low threshold property of this demonstration could lower the cost of lasers, and improve the throughput of laser machining due to the quasi-CW nature of the laser used. Our initial results shows that damages are observed with threshold as low as 1nJ before the UV objective, and then size is below 1 micron.