Lasers, with their unique characteristics in terms of excellent beam quality, especially directionality and coherency, make them the solution that is key for many processes that require high precision. Lasers have good susceptibility to integrate with automated systems, which provides high flexibility to reach difficult zones. In addition, as a processing tool, a laser can be considered as a contact-free tool of precise tip that became attractive for high precision machining at the micro and nanoscales for different materials. All of the above advantages may be not enough unless the laser technician/engineer has enough knowledge about the mechanism of interaction between the laser light with the processed material. Several sequential phenomena occur when an intense laser beam is incident on the surface of a material. Heating, melting, vaporization and plasma formation are present in the normal interaction of an intense laser beam with matter. This may be followed by additional events such as acoustic and optical emissions, structure shockwaves, thermal effects, structural defects and residual stresses. The process is affected by a lot of variables that can transfer the interaction towards extremely different behavior in terms of colder and fewer side-effect interactions, which yield precise features for the processed material. The most crucial variables are the time scale of interaction and laser wavelength with respect to the properties of the processed material undertaken as well as the laser fluence. The objective of this chapter is to introduce the fundamentals of physical and mathematical concepts of laser and matter interaction and its dependency on different time scale regimes. Interaction with a short and ultra-short laser pulse has attracted a significant amount of interest in industry due to its huge impact in micro-/nanomachining applications.
