Ablation of silicon and ultrathin fibers using single femtosecond pulse

We exploit the nonlinear multiphoton interaction of a few-cycle femtosecond (fs) pulse with viscoelastic microfibers in order to produce nanoscale grooves on its surface. The single fs pulse has been extracted from 1 kHz pulse train by double-shutter gating technique by placing two mechanical shutters in the beamline and simultaneously triggering them with a controlled delay. With adjustment of the time delay between two shutters, a small transmission window has been created to cleanly extract a single or desired number of pulses. We found that the single-pulse ablation threshold for microfiber is $$1 \hbox { J}/\hbox {cm }^2$$ while for absorbing surfaces like crystalline Si is $$0.01 \hbox { J}/\hbox {cm}^2$$. Precise diffraction unlimited ablation of materials opens a route to process nanoscale waveguides, microfluidic devices to isolate cells or macro-molecules.