In order to improve the morphology of microchannels fabricated by femtosecond laser ablation, the thermal process was introduced into the post-treatment processing. It was found that the thermal process cannot only decrease the roughness but also the width and depth of the microchannel. The change rates of width, depth, and roughness of the microchannel increase with processing temperature. When we prolong the time of constant temperature, the change rate of the width decreases at the beginning, and then it tends to be stable. However, the change rates of depth and roughness increase, and then they tend to be stable. In this Letter, we discuss the reasons of the above phenomena.

We evaluate the effects of the holes geometry drilled by a femtosecond laser on a stainless alloy with various defocused irradiation time, which ranges from 0 min to 1 h. The laser ablation efficiency is increased by a factor of 3 when the irradiation time is elevated from 0 to 30 min. Also, the morphology of the hole is observed by a scanning electron microscope, where the result indicates that the defocused irradiation time has a significant influence on the morphology changes. The reason for such changes is discussed based on the pretreatment effect and the confined plasma plume. As an application example, the microchannel is fabricated by a femtosecond laser combined with the defocused irradiation to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method in fabricating functional structures.

A fused silica glass micro-channel can be formed by chemical etching after femtosecond laser irradiation, and the successful etching probability is only 48%. In order to improve the micro-channel fabrication success probability, the method of processing a high-temperature lattice by a femtosecond laser pulse train is provided. With the same pulse energy and scanning speed, the success probability can be increased to 98% by optimizing pulse delay. The enhancement is mainly caused by the nanostructure, which changes from a periodic slabs structure to some intensive and loose pore structures. In this Letter, the optimum pulse energy distribution ratio to the etching is also investigated.

We propose a high temperature-sensitive long period fiber grating (LPFG) sensor fabricated by using the femtosecond laser transversal-scanning method. The femtosecond pulses scan over the whole fiber core and some part of the cladding region; the modified regions are more extended. It is found that the LPFG-I fabricated by the transversal-scanning method shows higher temperature sensitivity and better temperature uniformity than that of LPFG-II written by the femtosecond laser point-by-point method. The LPFG-I with a temperature sensitivity of 75.96 pm/°C in the range of 25°C–400°C is measured. Moreover, in the range from 400°C to 800°C, a higher temperature sensitivity of 148.64 pm/°C and good linearity of 0.99 are achieved, while the temperature sensitivity of LPFG-II is only 95.55 pm/°C. LPFG-I exhibits better temperature characteristics, which, to the best of our knowledge, has the highest sensitivity in silica fiber temperature sensors.