Tuesday, 12 October 2004 - 9:50 AM

This presentation is part of : Femtosecond Laser Micro/nano-machining II

Micromachining of Aerogel Using Ultrashort Femtosecond Laser and Subsequent Investigation and Improvement of Aerogel Cut Transparency (student talk)

Raghavendra Kagita, Dennis R Alexander, David W. Doerr, Nageswara Rao Tadepalli, Chaitanya Kumar Thatipamula, and John Schiffern. Center for Electro-Optics, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, WSEC 248, Box 880511 ,, Lincoln, NE 68588

The rapid advances in the generation and amplification of ultrashort laser pulses (≤ 50 fs) have opened up many new possibilities in laser-matter interaction and material processing. Ultrashort laser pulses offer high laser irradiance and offer precise laser-induced breakdown threshold with reduced laser fluence. The ablation of materials with ultrashort pulses has a very limited heat-affected volume. In this journal, processing of aerogel material using femtosecond laser and extracting the cores from aerogel material has been discussed. Aerogel blocks have micro and nano-particles embedded in them which resemble a carrot shaped track with nano-particle at the tip of the track. The present work reflects different methods of extracting the nano-particles from aerogel blocks without wasting the aerogel material surrounding the track and the subsequent analysis of the cored out material to increase the transparency of the laser processed material so that the track can be visible. Also the optical transmission analysis is carried out in order to quantify the transparency of the processed material with different parameters and the came up with a method that gives good optical transparency of aerogel material processed using ultrashort femtosecond laser.

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