Materials processing with a tightly focused femtosecond laser vortex pulse

In this Letter we present the first (to our knowledge) demonstration of material modification using tightly focused single femtosecond laser vortex pulses. Double-charge femtosecond vortices were synthesized with a polarization-singularity beam converter based on light propagation in a uniaxial anisotropic medium and then focused using moderate- and high-NA optics (viz., NA=0.45 and 0.9) to ablate fused silica and soda-lime glass. By controlling the pulse energy, we consistently machine micrometer-size ring-shaped structures with <100nm uniform groove thickness.