Ultrafast Lasers for Flight Instrument Fabrication and Packaging, Year 3

This effort will build upon the FY18 CIF to demonstrate new material processing capabilities. An Ultrafast laser will be used to make welds between dissimilar materials (such as glass to metal), laser drilling of small holes without heating of the surrounding material, and ultimately inscribing waveguides inside of glass. This technology offers a wide range of micro-machining capabilities not currently available. In FY18 welds were performed between glass and glass as well as Glass and Sapphire to metals such as Copper and Invar. In FY19 the team will extend their efforts to actual applications on existing science instrument fabrication by demonstrating real world applications such as optical bonding and micromachining with typical aerospace materials. They have already begun reaching out to other groups and missions to make them aware of the capabilities this technology. This technology can be applied to the deveopment of photonics integrated circuits (PIC). Future opportunities such as ESTO's ACT, IIP, EVIs, EVM's, Planetary Sciences' PIDD, MatiSSE, New Frontiers, Discovery, etc. will require more advanced laser instrumentation to meet the science requirements. The new fabrication processes enabled by this technology could improve such laser instruments by allowing them to be assembled without epoxied that may outgass and greatly shorten their operational lifetime. The FY18 effort successfully demonstrated welding of glass and sapphire to metals.