In spite of recent rapid progress of high power solid state laser, CO2 laser systems are still useful for metal drilling with hole diameter of about 100 µm and depth of several tens of µm, because it requires large pulse energy of about 100 mJ with high beam quality. Mechanically Q-switched CO2 laser systems are favorable for such application with high repetition rate (>10 kHz) [1,2] and have the advantage of cost performance.

Topics
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© 2005 Laser Institute of America.
2005
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