  The industrial maturity of ultrashort pulsed lasers has triggered the
development of a plethora of material processing strategies. Recently, the
combination of these remarkable temporal pulse properties with advanced
structured light concepts has led to breakthroughs in the development of novel
laser application methods, which will now gradually reach industrial
environments. We review the efficient generation of customized focus
distributions from the near infrared down to the deep ultraviolet, e.g., based
on non-diffracting beams and 3D-beam splitters, and demonstrate their impact
for micro- and nanomachining of a wide range of materials. In the beam shaping
concepts presented, special attention was paid to suitability for both high
energies and high powers.
