ABSTRACT
In the last years, material processing with femtosecond (fs) laser pulses has attracted increasing attention. Compared to ns pulses, the main advantages of fs pulses are the reduction of the thermal diffusion and consequently the thermal degradation of the target, the reduction of shielding induced by the plasma plume and the improvement of the morphology of the ablated surface. In particular, fs laser cleaning can be advantageous for the treatment of light-sensitive substrates as artistic paintings (Fotakis et al. 2007 & Pouli et al. 2007).
