High speed drilling of metals with a long pulse XeCl excimer laser

Publications about material processing with different lasers with different pulse lengths have shown that long pulses have higher processing speeds. To study the influence of only the pulse length we use a technique of slicing pulses with different pulse lengths out of a long pulse. In this way pulses between 5 and 150 ns length are created out of a 175 ns pulse of a XeCl laser. The pulse length is the only varied beam parameter. This paper shows the results of hole drilling experiments in 125 µm aluminium foil with pulses of 10 and 100 ns length. The influence of the pulse length on material processing speed is discussed in terms of equal energy and equal power density for the different pulse lengths. In both cases more material is removed by using long pulses.