Miniaturization and high precision are rapidly becoming a requirement for many industrial processes and products. As a result, there is greater interest in the use of laser microfabrication technology to achieve these goals. This book composed of 16 chapters covers all the topics of laser precision processing from fundamental aspects to industrial applications to both inorganic and biological materials. It reviews the sate of the art of research and technological development in the area of laser processing.

Femtosecond lasers opened up new avenue in materials processing due to its unique features of ultrashort pulse width and extremely high peak intensity. One of the most important features of femtosecond laser processing is that strong absorption can be induced even by materials which are transparent to the femtosecond laser beam due to nonlinear multiphoton absorption. The multiphoton absorption allows us to perform not only surface but also three-dimensionally internal microfabrication of transparent materials such as glass. This capability makes it possible to directly fabricate three-dimensional microfluidics, micromechanics, microelectronics and microoptics embedded in the glass. Further, these microcomponents can be easily integrated in a single glass microchip by the simple procedure using the femtosecond laser. Thus, the femtosecond laser processing provides some advantages over conventional methods such as traditional semiconductor processing or soft lithography for fabrication of microfluidic, optofludic and lab-on-a-chip devices and thereby many researches on this topic are currently being carried out. This book presents a comprehensive review on the state of the art and future prospects of femtosecond laser processing for fabrication of microfluidics and optofludics including principle of femtosecond laser processing, detailed fabrication procedures of each microcomponent and practical applications to biochemical analysis.

Over the past few decades, the rapid development of ultrafast lasers, such as femtosecond lasers and picosecond lasers, has opened up new avenues for material processing due to their unique features such as ultrashort pulse width and extremely high peak intensity. These techniques have become a common tool for micro- and nanoprocessing of a variety of materials and are now widely used for both fundamental researches and practical applications.

This book is composed of 12 chapters covering relevant topics of ultrafast laser processing, including laser itself and novel beam manipulation methods for processing, fundamentals of ultrafast laser processing, nanomaterial synthesis, surface micro- and nanostructuring, micromachining, two-photon photopolymerization, internal modification/fabrication of transparent materials, applications to photonic devices and microchips for biological analysis, industrial applications, and so on. Each chapter is written by world-leading scientists in the related field so as to give comprehensive reviews in the field of ultrafast laser micro- and nanoprocessing.

Miniaturization and high precision are rapidly becoming a requirement for many industrial processes and products. As a result, there is greater interest in the use of laser microfabrication technology to achieve these goals. This book composed of 16 chapters covers all the topics of laser precision processing from fundamental aspects to industrial applications to both inorganic and biological materials. It reviews the sate of the art of research and technological development in the area of laser processing.

Microbiochips, such as a lab-on-a-chip (LOC) devices and micro total analysis systems, can be regarded conceptually as a biological equivalent of conventional silicon integrated circuits, which involve miniaturization and integration of electronics. As its name implies, an ideal LOC should have a very small footprint and yet still be capable of functioning as a laboratory in which partial or complete chemical or biological analysis can be performed automatically. This book provides an overview of 3D femtosecond laser direct writing technology and highlight its potential for fabrication of complex smart microsystems by furnishing some examples of fabrication and hybrid integration of microfluidics, micromechanics, photonics, and electronics.