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Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) has emerged as a promising two-dimensional (2D)material for many applications in photonics. Although its linear and nonlinearoptical properties have been extensively studied, its interaction withhigh-intensity laser pulses, which is important for high-harmonic generation,fabricating quantum emitters, and maskless patterning of hBN, has not beeninvestigated. Here we report the first study of dielectric breakdown in hBNmonolayers induced by single femtosecond laser pulses. We show that hBN has thehighest breakdown threshold among all existing 2D materials. This enables us toobserve clearly for the first time a linear dependence of breakdown thresholdon the bandgap energy for 2D materials, demonstrating such a linear dependencyis a universal scaling law independent of the dimensionality. We also observecounter-intuitively that hBN, which has a larger bandgap and mechanicalstrength than quartz, has a lower breakdown threshold. This implies carriergeneration in hBN is much more efficient. Furthermore, we demonstrate the cleanremoval of hBN without damage to the surrounding hBN film or the substrate,indicating that hBN is optically very robust. The ablated features are shown topossess very small edge roughness, which is attributed to its ultrahighfracture toughness. Finally, we demonstrate femtosecond laser patterning of hBNwith sub-wavelength resolution, including an isolated stripe width of 200 nm.Our work advances the knowledge of light-hBN interaction in the strong fieldregime and firmly establishes femtosecond lasers as novel and promising toolsfor one-step deterministic patterning of hBN monolayers.

Dielectric breakdown and sub-wavelength patterning of monolayer hexagonal boron nitride using femtosecond pulses