Ultrashort-pulse laser micro-polishing of lithium niobate by using UV-ps pulses

We present a new fabrication method to realize smooth structures in lithium niobate. Therefore a detailed study on laser micro-polishing using ultrashort laser pulses is carried out by separating the effects of spatial pulse overlap and temporal pulse overlap. The adventage of this approach is the smoothing of the processed area by a simultaneous ablation. That will allow ablation depths between 1 µm and 4 µm with rms-roughness values of ≈20 nm.