Femtosecond laser micromachining for the realization of fully integrated photonic and microfluidic devices

Femtosecond laser microprocessing is a direct, maskless fabrication technique that has attracted much attention in the past 10 years due to its unprecedented versatility in the 3D patterning of transparent materials. Two common modalities of femtosecond laser microfabrication include buried optical waveguide writing and surface laser ablation, which have been applied to a wide range of transparent substrates including glasses, polymers and crystals. In two photon polymerization, a third modality of femtosecond laser fabrication, focused femtosecond laser pulses drive photopolymerization in photoresists, enabling the writing of complex 3D structures with submicrometer resolution. In this paper, we discuss several microdevices realized by these diverse modalities of femtosecond laser microfabrication, for applications in microfluidics, sensing and quantum information.