Fabrication and characterization of transparent materials with high power, shaped laser beams

Femtosecond (fs) pulsed lasers have extraordinary physical properties and application potentials thanks to their ultra short pulse durations. Fs pulsed lasers achieved a significant breakthrough especially in the area of laser-matter interaction and laser machining. In this thesis, we investigated spatial and temporal shaping of fs laser beams and their interactions between transparent materials. In addition, we used fs laser machining on microfluidic applications. Within the scope of thesis, we performed generation, characterization of Bessel and Airy beams. We used fs pulsed Bessel and Airy beams in order to obtain linear and curved reftactive index modifications inside the glass thanks to extended focal depth of Bessel and Airy beams. At last, we performed the coupling experiments. Another application that fs laser pulses used commonly is micro-machining. We used fs laser pulses to produce microchannels on the superhydrophobic surface (SHS) and inside bulk aerogel. Also, we generated microchannels inside the droplet-based microfluidics chips. Firstly, we demonstrated hydrophilic microchannels on the SHS and investigated optofluidic waveguide properties. After, we succeeded to obtain 3D microchannels inside the aerogel monolith without any damage. We demonstrated waveguiding and measured optical attenuation of these microchannels. Lastly, we fabricated droplet based microfluidic systems in PDMS using fs laser. Temporally shaped laser beams have quite interesting properties such as high polarization dependence during the interaction between fs laser and transparent materials. These effects can be explained via nonlinear effects called spatio temporal couplings (STCs). Within the scope of this thesis, we investigated STC in theoretical and experimental manner.