Method for welding at high processing speed with polarised laser beam

A new high speed laser welding method is presented which has the following characteristics: - the welding speed is up to ten times higher than in conventional laser beam welding - the band edges have to be formed in a convex cone - the direction of the polarisation is adjusted vertically to the plane of incidence (s-polarisation) i.e. parallely to the plane of joining - if the height of the edges corresponds to the material thickness of the component, the diameter of the beam gets an elliptic shape. Here, the length of the ellipse corresponds to the material thickness. The shaping of the beam perpendiculary to the band edges is made on consideration of the shape of the components.