Ultrafast Laser Welding of Crystalline Materials

Point of contact: Dr Richard Carter

A wide array of photonic devices are depended on crystal materials for their operation and their performance is highly dependant on preserving the properties of the crystal lattice.

Current manufacturing techniques provide trade-offs in terms of cost, size (a limiting factor for the design of devices) and quality. The issues are further increases when the limited capabilities and costs associated with manufacturing bulk crystals into specific device geometries are taken into consideration. This generally leads to significant trade-offs between performance and cost with many such devices operating far below their theoretical capabilities.

Work carried out within Heriot-Watt and elsewhere has demonstrated that it is possible to exert the necessary control to weld together transparent glass materials using ultrashort pulse lasers. This form of material modification makes use of the unique capacities of ultrashort pulses to locally melt material internally to form a bond. However there has been little investigation of the effect on crystals. With the right thermo-mechanical conditions, it should be possible to control to the resulting bond lattice structure as the melted material cools and re-solidifies.

Within this project we will explore the capacity of ultrashort pulse lasers to weld together crystals and control the resulting lattice structures as a tool for optical device fabrication.

This work is part funded by AFRL via EOARD Award Number FA8655-23-1-7032

Collaborators: R. McCracken (IPAQS), AFRL