Bourns Hall

Colloquium

Santiago Camacho López Departamento de Óptica, Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada (CICESE) Ultrafast Laser Materials Processing: Physics and Some Applications Abstract Quickly after the laser was invented it became a very useful tool in the field of materials processing. Since then fundamental research and applications in this field have generated lots of activity in both laser development and materials science labs. The use of ultrashort pulse lasers in materials processing opened a whole new area of research in the field. As a consequence of the rapid development of ultrafast lasers, and the achievement of extremely short pulses (<100fs) serious technical difficulties were faced when it came to the issue of amplification (at that time, a requirement for those pulses to be useful in materials processing). However, a crucial novel technique for manipulating ultrashort pulses was introduced in 1985 making amplification of pulses as short as 5fs possible. This move made extremely high peak intensities available for materials microprocessing in a new regime, where nonlinear optical phenomena became dominant in the light-matter interaction. In this regime of laser materials processing quite interesting features were obtained. In my talk I will present a review of the ultrafast materials processing technique. I will also discuss a non-chronological classification of lasers in the materials processing context. Within this classification I will discuss what we call a new fluence delivery method which is of crucial relevance for materials processing. In the applications area I will present some of the challenges which actually link back to fundamental optical problems. Biosketch Santiago Camacho López is currently a researcher at the Departamento de Óptica, Centro de Investigación Cientifica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada (CICESE). Prior to this position, Dr. Camacho López was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Physics, University of Toronto. His research interests include advanced laser materials processing: laser-induced refractive index change in transparent materials; laser ablation of metals and ceramics; laser interaction with biotissue; laser-induced phase changes in metallic and semi conductor thin films and the design of laser oscillators using nonlinear mirrors (Optical phase conjugation mirrors). Dr. Camacho López received his PhD in Physics from the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine. Wednesday, January 26, 2005 Bourns Hall, Room A265 10:10 a.m.-11:00 a.m. (Refreshments will be served at 10:00 a.m.)