Practical application of picosecond laser micro-machining to the direct fabrication of a diffraction grating mold

摘要

Picosecond (ps) laser micro-machining has emerged as an attractive method of fabricating high-precision microstructures, especially in metals. In this paper, a metallic mold for diffraction gratings is fabricated with a mode-locked 10 ps Nd:YVO_4 laser. Laser pulses with a wavelength of 355nm are irradiated on the surface of NOK 80, a mold material, to generate line patterns. In order to minimize the line width, laser power is set just above the ablation threshold of NOK 80. Results show that the spectrum from the fabricated mold is good enough for some industrial application.