ABSTRACT

Temporal manipulation of ultrashort laser pulses allows efficient injection of energy to a material to perform laser processing with high precision and high energy-use efficiency. Spatial manipulation is also effective in laser material processing with high throughput and high energy-use efficiency regardless of the irradiation energy. In the entire laser processing system, from the laser source to the target material, temporal pulse manipulation allows spectral dispersion control of the system and photon-matter interactions, and spatial pulse manipulation allows efficient photon delivery to the target. Both types of manipulation are mathematically identical and share many similarities in their implementations, except for the difficulty of direct time-domain control of ultrashort pulses. Recently spatiotemporal pulse manipulation techniques that simultaneously

control the temporal and spatial properties of pulses have been studied. With this technique, total optimization of the pulse properties greatly enhances the processing capabilities.