ABSTRACT
The development of laser technologies has a social aspect – jobs are created for highly qualified personnel, which lead to an increase in the educational level of engineers and workers and production culture. The use of laser technologies is extremely diverse: welding, surface processing, alloying and surfacing, cutting and dimensioning, cutting materials, marking and engraving, and precision micro-welding of electronic components. The radiation energy emanating from the copper vapour lasers (CVL) with small pulse portions and with a large peak power at high pulse repetition frequency provides a highly controlled and predictable removal of material from the treated area with the formation of minimal heat-affected zones. The CVL can be used to drill efficiently micro-holes in optical materials – in glass, quartz, ruby, and sapphire. The pulsed CVL with respect to the set of parameters is an ideal contactless tool for precision microprocessing a wide range of metallic and non-metallic materials, including transparent ones.
