Ablation efficiency improvement through ultrafast pulse repetition rate scaling

Abstract

Ultrafast single-pulse material ablation provides supreme precision but suffers severely from low process efficiencies. Increases in the repetition rate with simultaneous reductions of the pulse energy offer significant rises in ablation efficiency as the process is carried on in the ablation-cooled ultrafast removal regime. We present a tenfold gain in ablation efficiency compared to conventional single-pulse processing and a sixfold increase over previously reported results by increasing the repetition rate to 50 GHz.