Direct laser diode pumping has now been brought to Kerr lens modelocked Ti:sapphire lasers, lowering the pump subsystem cost by a factor of ten and potentially leading to a new generation of Ti:sapphire lasers.

An optimized material joint design for laser welding is not only at the heart of a successful implementation, but it is the key to financial justification for the laser joining process.

Hybrid semiconductor-metal lasers are making big progress on the nano frontier, scaling to smaller sizes and continuous-wave operation. But theorists warn that reducing size too much will increase losses, limiting how far lasers can shrink.

The combination of two high-speed synchronized CMOS cameras with analysis software produces accurate mechanical deformation data for use by product-design engineers.

In the push to scale fiber lasers and amplifiers to higher and higher average powers and pulse energies, one of the routes to decreasing the nonlinearities that typically limit performance is to increase the effective area of the fiber through higher-order-mode operation.

A real-time beam metrology module aboard a 193 nm excimer light source can monitor laser beam parameters such as beam divergence, near-field profiles, polarization, energy density, and beam pointing during wafer exposure, improving immersion lithography process control.

In the quest for ever-better performance of white LEDs for illumination, researchers at Kookmin University and PSI Co. have created a series of multipackage LEDs that have luminous efficacies of around 100 lm/W and, at the same time, high Ra color-rendering indices (CRIs) of around 95.

Applied Scientific Instrumentation (ASI) has developed a continuous reflective-interface sample-placement (CRISP) system that mostly eliminates focus drift in high-power microscopes by sensing minute changes between the objective lens and the specimen’s cover slip, and then providing a feedback signal to any of ASI’s focus controllers or existing piezoelectric-based focusing devices such as their rapid automated modular microscope (RAMM) system.

Last year, Laser Focus World reported on a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based 1310 nm widely tunable vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) that enabled 760 kHz optical coherence tomography (OCT) scanning in conjunction with a 110 nm tuning range.

Scientists at Tianjin University are now experimenting with terahertz time-domain spectroscopy at frequencies between 0.25 and 1.5 THz to determine the proportions in a mixture of gasoline and diesel.

Since standard Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometers require long measurement times to yield molecular spectra with sufficient signal to noise ratio, researchers are instead using frequency combs for significantly faster and real-time gas measurements.

A new type of solid-state maser developed by scientists at the National Physical Laboratory and Imperial College consists simply of a pentacene-doped crystal of p-terphenyl pumped by yellow light from a pulsed dye laser.

A variety of silicon-nanowire-based devices have been developed in recent years due to their unique optical properties.

Researchers at Bilkent University and FiberLAST Inc. and TÜBITAK Ulusal Metroloji Enstitüsu have created a forward-pumped short-pulse fiber laser in which the amount of dopant varies along the fiber.

Spectroscopic optical coherence tomography (SOCT) and variations such as Raman spectroscopic OCT (RS-OCT) often use absorption contrast agents such as gold nanoparticles to enhance diagnostics; however, these particles require modification to be compatible with infrared (IR) illumination.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, collaborating with the Weizmann Institute of Science, have demonstrated a drastically new way of achieving negative refraction in a metamaterial that results in a negative index as low as -700.