Femtosecond Laser Interaction and Nanostructuring – FELINS

Femtosecond Laser Interaction and Nanostructuring (FELINS). 3D and 2D Nano-scale up to micro-scale Laser patterning of materials by local photochemistry for photonic applications.
Femtosecond lasers are more and more used in materials processing. Numerous advantages make these femtosecond lasers a unique tool for the research and the new manufacturing processes. This process is fast and low cost, with minimum processing steps, and minimum sample preparation. Indeed, the strong intensity, the nonlinear interaction and the short pulse duration allow delivering locally in 3D the energy in materials faster than the thermal processes with a spatial resolution that could be below 500 nanometers as we demonstrated recently.
Up to now, this ultrafast material processing is only settled for drilling on chains of production (realization of syringes at BMW for example). Regarding innovative optical materials engineering, very numerous research groups use short pulse laser to modify the properties of existing and not well appropriate materials. This limits the application field and industrial development. Few teams have started to work on the photochemistry of adapted materials (L. Glebov, UCF USA), (HIRAO, Kyoto Univ. Japan), (T. HONNA and T. KOMATSU, Nagaoka Univ., Japan), (H. Jain, Lehigh Univ. USA).
The main difficulty is to merge the competences of laser material interaction and material science. We propose a consortium gathering all necessary expertise in chemistry and physics for success story.
In the present proposal we want to develop ultra short laser processing and photosensitive glasses, to engineer photonic structures. For photonic applications (photonic wave guide, optical integrated optics, optical switches, holography, 3D data storage, sensors…), it is necessary to control the structuring of the materials at the nanometer scale and at the micrometer scale but more importantly at the intermediate scale (~100 nm) while keeping the optical quality. The optical glasses offer also low losses and possibility of multiples compositions suitable for specific applications. They are naturally also adequate materials for the elaboration of optical composite materials (glass ceramic). New compositions must be adapted to the structuring to be engineered.
Our goal with this proposal is to present and define a new strategy to elaborate multi scale materials for optics. Femtosecond direct laser writing processing associated to specific photo sensitive material will allow multiscale structuring material from Nano-scale, mesoscale (100nm) up to micro-scale. This approach resulting from a mixed bottom up and top down approach will lead to breakthroughs in 3D and 2D structuring of materials for photonic applications.