The future looks bright for high-power semiconductor lasers | Laser Focus World

Applications of high-power diode lasers will grow as performance and reliability improve and new techniques enhance their brightness.

Micro-optics demonstrate their major potential

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The new laser facility is opened in Kassel, Germany.

HÜBNER Photonics opens new facility to manufacture quantum & AR lasers

The new facility will help them meet the growing demand they see for tunable single-frequency laser sources.

It has the size of a locomotive and will be a workhorse in fabs worldwide: The EUV stepper TWINSCAN NXE:3400B.

EUV lithography revisited

After three decades of development, a new generation of lithography machines has now been shipped; it uses extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light at a wavelength of 13.5 nm to make silicon features down to a few nanometers in size.

Laser Printed Fabric

Laser printing produces waterproof energy-storing e-textiles in minutes

The next generation of waterproof smart fabrics will be printed with conductive graphene elements using a combo of CO2 and ultrafast lasers.

Laser Markets Research president Allen Nogee provides an update of the laser markets for the summer, in advance of his more exhaustive quantitative review that will appear in the January 2020 issue of Laser Focus World magazine.

2019 Mid-Year Laser Update

Margins are high enough on specialty lasers to counter some of the tariffs--not completely but partially.

This ultrafast laser is used for industrial transparent and brittle material cutting.

GTS and Vitritech create new types of laser glass

The two new materials add to the range of glasses already produced by GTS and Vitritech for use in photonics.

Northrop Grumman was awarded a $200M contract for its LAIRCM system that protects aircrews by automatically detecting, tracking, and jamming incoming IR threats. Shown is the Guardian (trademarked) Pointer/Tracker.

Northrop Grumman awarded $200M infrared countermeasures contract

The LAIRCM system protects aircrews by automatically detecting, tracking, and jamming incoming IR threats.

Single-layer OLED design could dramatically reduce display costs

Rather than 5 to 7 layers, these single-layer OLEDs could be inkjet-printed and dramatically lower display costs and complexity.

When illuminated with laser light, a liquid-crystal elastomer robot (inset) about 1 cm long crawls up walls and across ceilings just like the banded snail sitting next to it.

Light-activated LC elastomer propels biomimetic “snail robot”

The centimeter-long soft robot harvests energy from a laser beam and can crawl on horizontal surfaces, vertical walls, and ceilings.

Lasers for lidar and more

Editor in chief John Lewis introduces Laser Focus World’s August 2019 issue, which includes trends in photonics technologies, applications, and markets.

John Ambroseo, President and CEO of Coherent.

Business Forum: Laser markets evolve, price battles continue—an interview with John Ambroseo

An interview with the president and CEO of Coherent reveals a laser industry still changing, driven by commodization and continual advances in technologies and applications.

QCL-based infrared spectroscopic ellipsometer rapidly acquires data

Built around a quantum-cascade laser (QCL), the first laser-based infrared spectroscopic ellipsometer will aid biologists and materials scientists.

Frequency-comb Sources: One microresonator-based soliton comb replaces multiple WDM lasers

Microresonator-based pure quartic solitons (PQSs) efficiently convert CW laser light into frequency combs with the power uniformity of individual CW lasers.

Shown are tuning curves for three quantum dots positioned on the waveguide at the locations shown in the inset, to achieve identical emission (a). High-resolution Fabry-Perot interferometer measurements show all three quantum dots simultaneously from an output coupler with identical emission wavelength (b).

Quantum Sources: Squeezed quantum dots create coherent streams of quantum-ready photons

By squeezing quantum dots using unique semiconductor-based processes, coherent single photons are generated that can be used for on-chip quantum photonics that demand identical photons from multiple integrated sources.

FIGURE 1. In the scalable setting of a spatial photonic Ising machine, binary spins are encoded in the phase of a laser beam (green) by spatial modulation. Tailoring of the beam’s amplitude fixes spin-spin interaction. To find the ground-state spin configuration, the machine recurrently evolves according to a feedback signal from the camera plane. By design, maximizing the intensity in a target region (blue square) corresponds to a spin state with minimum energy.

Photonics Modeling: Optical Ising machines solve complex engineering, science, and even business problems

Researchers have built the largest photonic Ising machine to date—an optical processor for solving difficult optimization problems by modeling interacting spins via a spatially varying light field.