In the past 30 years, a new thechnology has emerged for improving surface compressive residual stress in order to positively influence fatigue behavior, wear resistance, Stress Crack Corosion (S.C.C) and Flying Object Damage (FOD) of advanced aerospace components. This new thechnology is called Laser Shock Peening (LSP). In this process a high intensity short pulsed laser is used to generate an extreamly high pressure plasma plum to introduce compressive residual stress to the surface of the components. In this thesi, this advanced surface modifying process is investigated experimentally. At first the process is introduced and all factors and parameters affecting its impacts on process outputs are introduced accurately and then the process is investigated in two separate phases. In the first phase of the experiments, using an Nd: YAG laser with 100mJ of energy per pulse and pulse width of 100 ns, LSP was conducted on foils of copper with 0.09 mm thickness. Compressive residual stress caused by LSP, would bend the foils and this bend is used as a measure for evaluating the process capabilities. Studies showed this process could be beneficial to be used as an accurate micro bending tool. In the second phase, using another Nd: YAG laser with pulse energy of 1200 mJ and pulse width of 8 ns, LSP process was conducted on Al 6061-T6 blocks and effect of process parameters including number of laser shots,spot overlap rates and scan pattern on micro hardness in depth and surface roughness was studied. Furthuemore microstructure of samples after LSP was studied. Finally using XRD residual stress measurement method, residual stresses of processed and non processed samples were measured. The results showed that using the foregoing experimental setup, deep and high amplitude compressive residual stress can be induced on the surface of Al 6061- T6 samples. On the other hand, it was observed that the hardness of the samples can be improved as a consequence of LSP. Finally it was spotted that the surface roughness of samples processed by LSP can be deteriorated depending on the process parameters Key word: Laser Shock Peening, Residual Stress, Bending of Thin Foils, Al 6061- T6, Hardness, Roughness