Patent ID: 8314359

Claim:
A method for welding materials, comprising: focusing a beam of ultrashort laser pulses near an interface between said materials, at least one of said materials being transparent at a wavelength of said ultrashort pulses; and producing said ultrashort laser pulses at a repetition rate in the range from 100 kHz to 100 MHz, and with one or more zones of fluence sufficient to induce localized melting of said materials at said interface without ablation of said materials, said ultrashort pulses providing a fluence of more than about 0.01 J/cm 2 in said one or more zones, and intensity sufficient to cause non-linear absorption within said materials, wherein a pulse to pulse temporal spacing corresponding to said repetition rate in said range is sufficiently small to cause accumulation of heat in said materials so as to induce said localized melting at said interface.