Gap bridging in joining of glass using ultra short laser pulses

Glass welding by ultra-short laser pulses provides hermetic welding seams with high mechanical stability. The required distance between the samples must be extremely small (<100nm), otherwise cracks will form inside the seam reducing its stability. However, to achieve such small gaps the roughness of the samples must be small enough necessitating additional polishing. Additionally, Van-der-Waals forces grow substantial at such distances thereby effectively preventing sample movement and an easy and precise sample alignment. Here we present a method utilizing ultra-short laser pulses which exploits a volume expansion of irradiated glass enabling the joining of glass plates across gaps of up to 1µm.