Focus Alignment Method for Laser Manufacturing at Sub-micron Positional Accuracy

Accurate positioning of a sample is one of the major challenges in the laser micro manufacturing – especially if the requirements on tolerances are high as in ultrafast laser micromachining. There are a number of methods that allow detection of the surface position, however only few of them use the beam of the processing laser as a basis for the measurement. These methods have an advantage that any changes in the structuring beam will be inherently accommodated for. This work describes a direct contact free method to accurately determine the surface position with respect to the structuring beam focal plane. The method makes alignment of unique samples precise and time efficient due to ease of automation and provides a reproducibility of surface detection of less than 1 μm.