HiLASE at the Stuttgart Laser Technology Forum

Don’t miss the presentation by Michal Chyla, head of the commercial laser development team of the HiLASE Centre, at the Stuttgart Laser Technology Forum. On June 21st, shortly after noon in room C1.2.2, he will present the Perla thin-disk platform with high beam quality for multibeam micromachining.

Michal Chyla lecture invite

The Stuttgart Laser Technology Forum, which focuses on knowledge transfer, is organized in a biennial cycle alongside the International Laser Materials Processing Show (LASYS).

High beam quality thin-disk PERLA platform for multibeam micromachining
Annotation:
Industrial requirements for laser micromachining in the past years have consistently grown as laser became a natural choice of a tool for multiple applications from cutting and welding to structuring and sophisticated surface treatment. Together with the growing range of applications demand for faster and more powerful lasers increased significantly. This puts a lot of stress on lasers requirements with increasing output power and on the processing speed of scanners which for typical galvo scanners comes to the limit and for polygonal scanners the processing performance is limited to 2D dimensions which in some cases is not sufficient due to low variability.

A different approach is presented in multi-beam micromachining where the initial beam is split into multiple beams, even to more than 40,000 beams, and the sample is processed at once with all the beams [1,2]. The advantage of this solution is the possibility of using lasers with lower power but capable to provide higher energy and good beam quality in order for the process to work properly. Due to the large number of beams available at once, the requirement on processing speeds of galvo scanners remain in the scope of current technology. These conditions are perfectly met by PERLA thin-disk lasers as show in Fig.1. PERLA100 laser platform delivers up to 20 mJ pulse energy, 1 ps pulse duration and operates at 1-200 kHz repetition rate while keeping the beam quality below M2<1.2.

Figure 1. Left: Laser power and o-o efficiency characteristic. Right: Caustic of output beam with M2<1.15.

Authors:
Michal Chyla, Jiri Muzik, Lukas, Roskot, Hana Turcicova, Ondrej Novak, Petr Hauschwitz, Jan Brajer, Martin Smrz, Tomas Mocek

The Perla platform, which is the topic of the lecture, has also been developed at the HiLASE Centre as a stand-alone Perla 100 product for use in the industry. It is suitable for the aforementioned micromachining, for example, but also for other material processing, laser induced damage threshold testing, or analytical spectroscopy. Perla also includes the GOpico fibre oscillator, also available separately.