Oblique incidence of ultrafast laser for glass butt welding

Lap welding restricts the connection state of glasses by vertically incident ultrafast laser at the interface to be welded, which cannot meet the increasingly flexible welding needs. In this Letter, glass butt welding is achieved by oblique incidence of an ultrafast laser, expanding the applicability of ultrafast laser glass welding. Furthermore, the propagation path of the laser beam after oblique incidence into a glass is solved based on geometric optics, the dynamic development of the molten pool in a glass is observed through a high-speed camera, and the mechanism of glass butt welding is elucidated. Finally, the influence of laser pulse energy, glass tilt angle, and defocus amount on welding strength is investigated, achieving a maximum shear strength of 11.5 MPa.