Ultra-short duration pulse lasers

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The basic problem is that it takes a while for material in the path of your beam to move out of the beam, and while there's an upper limit to how much energy it can absorb, that upper limit is very very high. Thus, the normal drilling mechanism is 'apply energy, wait for the superheated material to exit the hole, repeat'; you can add more energy to get the material out of the hole faster, but doing so is extremely inefficient. Short wavelength penetrating radiation lets you heat a thicker layer at every pulse but doesn't otherwise evade this fundamental limit.

According to this, they actually can at the extreme end of the scale, because superheating the material apparently makes it become transparent to some radiation around the x-ray range. So the beam doesn't have to wait for the material to get out of the way, only for it to get hot enough.