Enhancing precision in fs-laser material processing by simultaneous spatial and temporal focusing

In recent years,femtosecond(fs)-lasers have evolved into a versatile tool for high precision micromachining of transparent materials because nonlinear absorption in the focus can result in refractive index modifications or material disruptions.However,when high pulse energies or low numerical apertures are required,nonlinear side effects such as self-focusing,filamentation or white light generation can decrease the modification quality.In this paper,we apply simultaneous spatial and temporal focusing(SSTF)to overcome these limitations.The main advantage of SSTF is that the ultrashort pulse is only formed at the focal plane,thereby confining the intensity distribution strongly to the focal volume and suppressing detrimental nonlinear side effects.Thus,we investigate the optical breakdown within a water cell by pump-probe shadowgraphy,comparing conventional focusing and SSTF under equivalent focusing conditions.The plasma formation is well confined for low pulse energies,2 mJ,but higher pulse energies lead to the filamentation and break-up of the disruptions for conventional focusing,thereby decreasing the modification quality.In contrast,plasma induced by SSTF stays well confined to the focal plane,even for high pulse energies up to 8 mJ,preventing extended filaments,side branches or break-up of the disruptions.Furthermore,while conventional focusing leads to broadband supercontinuum generation,only marginal spectral broadening is observed using SSTF.These experimental findings are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations of the nonlinear pulse propagation and interaction processes.Therefore,SSTF appears to be a powerful tool to control the processing of transparent materials,e.g.,for precise ophthalmic fs-surgery.

Chirp control of femtosecond-pulse scattering from drag-reducing surface-relief gratings

The role of chirp on the light-matter interaction of femto- and pico-second laser pulses with functional structured surfaces is studied using drag-reducing riblets as an example. The three-dimensional, periodic microstructure naturally gives rise to a mutual interplay of （i） reflection, （ii） scattering, and （iii） diffraction phenomena of incident coherent light. Furthermore, for femtosecond pulses, the structure induces （iv） an optical delay equivalent to a consecutive temporal delay of 230 fs in places of the pulse. These features enable studying experimentally and numerically the effect of tuning both pulse duration τ and spectral bandwidth Δω on the features of the wideangle scattering pattern from the riblet structure. As a result, we discovered a significant breakdown of fringes in the scattering pattern with decreasing pulse duration and/or increasing spectral bandwidth. This unique type of chirp control is straightforward/y explained and verified by numerical modeling considering the spectral and temporal interaction between different segments within the scattered, linearly chirped pulse and the particular geometric features of the riblet structure. The visibility of the fringe pattern can be precisely adjusted, and the offstate is achieved using τ 〈 230 fs or Δω〉 2.85 × 10^13 rad/s.

A novel integrated quantum circuit for high-order W-state generation and its highly precise characterization

Multipartite entangled states like the W-class are of growing interest since they exhibit a variety of possible applications ranging from quantum computation to genuine random number generation. Here, we present a universal setup to generate high-order single photon W-states based on three-dimensional integrated-photonic waveguide struc- tures. Additionally, we present a novel method to charac- terize the device＇s unitary by means of classical light only.