Nanotechnology Now - Press Release: Review on the femtosecond laser precision micro/nano-engineering

Prof. Hong Minghui's research group at the National University of Singapore summarizes the development and latest progress of laser precision engineering from micron, sub-micron, to nanoscale. Combined with other advanced processing tools, femtosecond laser precision engineering�s resolution has been much smaller than the optical diffraction limit, which will play an important role in next-generation nano-manufacturing. For the micron-scale creation, the widely employed femtosecond laser fabrication strategies, including two/multi-photons absorption, laser-induced plasma-assisted ablation, and incubation effect are highlighted.

Furthermore, the recent progress about micro-lens arrays and interference lithography techniques for the sub-micron feature creation, especially large area periodic surface structuring, are also discussed. For the femtosecond laser nano-fabrication, both the processing strategies working in near field and far field are summarized.

The outlook of femtosecond laser precision engineering is also evaluated. How to achieve small heat affected zone is the first key issue in high quality laser precision engineering to push its resolution from micro-scale to nano-scale. Secondly, ensuring a high enough processing speed to meet various industrial needs is also a key challenge since one beam laser processing at high resolution could not meet this requirement. The third challenge is how to carry out the laser nano-structuring in the far field as the near field effect requires tiny optics working very close to sample surfaces, which confines the near field laser nano-fabrication to be only suitable for a few super-smooth surface samples.