The influence of substrate temperature on femtosecond laser micro-processing of silicon, stainless steel and glass

We report the influence of substrate temperature on femtosecond laser ablation of silicon, stainless steel, and glass. Remarkable decrease in surface roughness was observed under high substrate temperature for silicon and stainless steel. While the ablation efficiency of glass as a typical wide band-gap material is scarcely altered at 900 K, the efficiency for stainless steel as a conductor apparently increased about 20% accompanied to the elevation of substrate temperature from 300 to 900 K. Silicon wafer results in slight increase of the ablation efficiency with decreasing the ablation threshold. Considering that the melting temperature of glass is much lower than those of silicon and steel, the observations from this work suggests that the material ablation caused by the ultrafast laser irradiation could not be explained in term of only laser-induced thermal excitation.