Nanofibre Fabrication by Femtosecond Laser Ablation of Silica Glass

This article presents a fabrication technique for generating densely populated and randomly oriented silica nanofibres by direct ablation of silica glass using a femtosecond laser with 12.4 MHz repetition rate and a pulse width of 214 fs, under ambient conditions. Four types of nanofibres with diameters ranging from a few tens of nanometers to a few hundreds of nanometers were formed. Some fibers reach lengths of 10 mm. The possible mechanisms for fibre formation have been explored.