Mantas Gaidys (academic supervisor: Dr. Mindaugas Gedvilas) presented his topic "Efficient laser surface coloring of stainless-steel using femtosecond GHz bursts" at the conference and was awarded the best oral presentation award for the second year in a row.

 

Congratulations to our colleague and best wishes for continued success!

 

In 2023, Mantas' work was nominated at the LPM2023 conference in Aomiri, Japan. This year's LPM2024 conference featured 199 oral presentations by top international scientists from around the world, of which 40 were student presentations. A PhD student from Lithuania competed for the nomination against researchers from universities and research centers in Belgium, China, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Spain, France, Romania, the United Kingdom and the United States.

 

For the first time in the history of the prestigious Symposium on Laser Precision Microfabrication, a young scientist managed to win the best oral presentation title twice in a row and defend the title of best researcher. This is a great international recognition of the scientist's work and the entire Lithuanian laser technology sector. The work was carried out at the Laser Microfabrication Laboratory of the FTMC Department of Laser Technologies.

 

 

In recent years, much attention has been paid to laser microfabrication using bursts. Using laser pulse burst modes, it is possible to split a high energy pulse into several lower energy pulses with a total energy equal to that of the high energy pulse. This is very useful for laser coloring of metals. Laser coloring has almost become an industrial process with many applications in the medical and automotive industries as well as in jewellery and branding.

 

Laser surface coloring is highly dependent on the laser processing parameters. To achieve the best result, parameters such as scanning speed, pulse repetition rate, pulse duration, pulse duration, number of pulses in the burst and others need to be optimised, which is an exhausting and time-consuming task.

 

In this work, an experiment was carried out in which stainless steel samples were colored by a femtosecond laser in a gigahertz burst by varying the average laser power and the scanning speed. A wide color gamut was obtained on stainless steel and record coloring speeds of up to 45 square millimetres per second were achieved.