Glass materials with higher indices of refraction are being developed for use in augmented reality (AR) and similar immersive reality eyewear. Benefits such as lighter weight, larger/better display, and reduced power consumption are being realized through the development of new types of glass having refractive indices above 1.7 and approaching 2.0. As the AR eyewear market continues to grow, there is a growing need to cut these materials with good quality and at high throughputs. AR glass materials present additional challenges for kerf-less laser cutting, as these methods depend on the propagation of light through the bulk of the material which can be impacted both by the material index as well as any coatings present on the glass surfaces. In this work we demonstrate the use of tailored picosecond infrared (IR) pulse bursts to improve the quality of high-throughput Bessel beam-based glass cutting processes, with noteworthy results including roughness improvements of ~40%, overall throughputs in the meters-per-second regime, and cutting of corner radiuses as small as 500 µm. Furthermore, because AR eyewear incorporates active glass for image projection, various glass surface coatings need to be applied. As such, we also present cutting results with the Bessel beam passing through a slit aperture located proximal to the glass surface, which represents processing through an opened channel in such coatings.
Keywords
- Augmented Reality Eyewear
- Cutting High Index Of Refraction Glass
- Picosecond Ir Bessel Cutting
- Picosecond Pulse Burst Tailoring