Recognizing that bellies will be full from lunch, Seifert will aim to make the afternoon Executive Panel discussion lively, eye-opening, and informative (hopefully, questions from the audience will keep it dynamic as well!). The panel features Peter Leibinger from
Trumpf, Sri Venkat from
Coherent, and Søren Isaksen from
NKT--each a powerhouse in these major photonics and laser companies that will be tasked, per the description provided on the
Seminar agenda, "to provide their perspectives on current markets, views on different technologies, and opinions about future challenges and opportunities for manufacturers and integrators of lasers and photonics products." As Seifert knows well, optical fiber is a critical photonics component in today's fiber laser technology. And as chairman of the board of directors for NKT's Photonics Group, Søren Isaksen can draw information from a number of successful product introductions from NKT in the past few years that wholly depend on state-of-the-art optical fiber technology, including its mid-infrared
supercontinuum laser and its tunable deep-UV supercontinuum laser that was detailed in a video (link below):
As an optical fiber manufacturer itself (including ytterbium designs for ultrafast fiber lasers), NKT's input to the panel will be well-informed. With all the buzz about fiber lasers, Coherent's senior VP/GM for Commercial Lasers and Components will no doubt describe how the company is capitalizing on the intense use of lasers in materials processing applications. In this year's 2014 Laser Market Review & Forecast to be published in the January 2014 issue (see the 2013 laser report here), we talk quite a bit about how lasers enable materials processing applications such as cell-phone manufacturing.
The question is, what types of lasers perform which materials processing tasks better? Are fiber lasers the only game in town, or will disk lasers or direct-diode lasers edge out fiber lasers in the end? One thing is for sure--fiber lasers from
IPG and
Raydiance can drill one heck of a nice hole in aerospace components and fuel injectors: