Discovering new properties and applications of ultrafast laser nanostructuring in transparent materials

摘要

In this paper we overview recent progress in ultrafast laser nanostructuring of transparent materials. A remarkable effect has also been discovered, referred to as quill or calligraphic laser writing, which reveals strong dependence of the material modification, in particular the self-assembled sub-wavelength structures in glass, on orientation of the writing direction relative to direction of the pulse front tilt. Moreover, evidence of the first order phase transition associated with self-assembled nanostructures formation was revealed and supercooled state of laser damage was observed using pulses with tilted intensity front. More recently it has been demonstrated that the tip of an ultrafast laser quill has a property that is very different from an ordinary quill. Specifically, the modification of glass can be controlled even in stationary conditions by the mutual orientation of light polarization azimuth and the pulse front tilt. More recently, the self-assembled sub-wavelength nanostructuring have been proposed for fabrication of vortex polarization converters and rewritable polarization multiplexed optical memory, where the information encoding is realized by means of two birefringence parameters, i.e. the slow axis orientation (4th dimension) and retardance (5th dimension), in addition to three spatial coordinates.