You're putting an awful lot of power into a small place in a very short period of time. The electrons are just blown out of the area, vaporizing the material that was in that spot. What is important is that you don't transfer the heat. It's different than the old lasers with longer pulses, where you used to create a lot of thermal damage.

These ultrashort pulse lasers create unique interactions with matter that have only been done before in university environments. Now we're making this capability inexpensive. We hope to seed an explosion of innovation. We're moving into the era of light. We call it the light age.