Waterjets can be used as light waveguides due to the total internal reflection at the water-air interface. As the diameter of the jet is large compared to the laser wavelength, the jet is comparable to a multimode fiber. In this article the propagation and the intensity distribution of a laser beam coupled in a laminar waterjet at various coupling conditions such as jet diameter, velocity and jet length as well as beam numerical aperture and beam position from jet center is studied. The intensity distributions are also compared with the structures resulting from high power material ablation using the Laser MicroJet (LMJ) technology.

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