Abstract

We report on a 72 W Yb all-fiber ultrafast laser system with 1.6 GHz intra-burst and 200 kHz burst repetition rate developed to demonstrate ablation-cooled material removal at high speeds. Up to 24 W is applied on Cu and Si samples with pulses of $\sim 300\mathrm{fs}$, and record-high ablation efficiencies are obtained, compared to published results to date, despite using only $\sim 100\mathrm{nJ}$ pulses. Ablation speeds approaching $1{\mathrm{mm}}^3/\mathrm{s}$ are reported with 24 W of average power, limited by available laser power and beam scanning speed. More significantly, these results experimentally confirm the theoretically expected linear scaling of the ablation-cooled regime to higher average powers without sacrificing efficiency, which implies that further scaling is possible with further increases in laser power and scanning speeds.

© 2018 Optical Society of America

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