Towards Rapid Fabrication of Superhydrophobic Surfaces by Multi-Beam Nanostructuring with 40,401 Beams.

Superhydrophobic surfaces attract a lot of attention due to many potential applications including anti-icing, anti-corrosion, self-cleaning or drag-reduction surfaces. Despite a list of attractive applications of superhydrophobic surfaces and demonstrated capability of lasers to produce them, the speed of laser micro and nanostructuring is still low with respect to many industry standards. Up-to-now, most promising multi-beam solutions can improve processing speed a hundred to a thousand times.

Generating flat-top beams with extended depth of focus.

Two approaches for generating flat-top beams (uniform intensity profile) with extended depth of focus are presented. One involves two diffractive optical elements (DOEs) and the other only a single DOE. The results indicate that the depth of focus of such beams strongly depends on the phase distribution at the output of the DOEs.