Ultrafast soda-lime glass scribing via self-filamentation of laser bursts

Laser filamentation is widely used in glass scribing. However, the μm-sized transverse extent of damage limits the distance between modifications and, therefore, the scribing speed. The distance between modifications can be increased by forming cracks along the scribing line. In this work, we use laser burst-in-burst regime to form volumetric polarization-controlled cracks in soda-lime glass via self-focusing. Stable separation of 1.1 mm-thick soda-lime glass samples is achieved using single-pass scribing with speeds of up to 10 m/s. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time filamentation-induced polarization-controlled cracks are used for glass scribing, reaching the highest scribing speed for controllable glass separation recorded to date.