Industrial grade ultrashort pulsed USP laser systems offer pulse durations of about 300 fs and higher whereas shorter pulse durations could only be achieved with research systems, as e.g. Ti:Sapphire, lacking from stability and high repetition rates as demanded for industrial laser micro processing. Former experiments showed that on the one hand and improve of the energy specific volume (process efficiency) can be achieved with shorter pulses especially for steels. On the other hand, an ablation regime with very smooth surfaces on soda-lime glass was observed with pulses shorter than about 500 fs. Thus, it is worth to investigate the sub 100 fs regime for industrial laser micromachining processes. We will show first results from basic investigations concerning the energy specific volume, the surface quality and the minimum achievable structure size for metals, semiconductors and glasses with an industrial grade NKT Aeropulse system at a waveleng6th of 1030 nm in combination with MIKS1 S pulse compressor from N2 Photonics (offering sub 100 fs pulses) and a high-end galvo scanner from Scanlab for repetition rates up to 1.2 MHz.
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