German Future Prize goes to team developing ultrashort pulse lasers for materials processing

Berlin, Germany--At an gala evening ceremony, German President Joachim Gauck awarded the Deutscher Zukunftspreis 2013, the German Future Prize, to the project titled, Ultra-short pulse lasers for industrial mass production--manufacturing with light flashes. The winning team consists of researchers from Robert Bosch (Schwieberdingen), Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena/Fraunhofer IOF (Jena), and TRUMPF Laser (Schramberg). The scientists developed an ultrashort pulse laser for extremely precise and reliable machining of material.

Members of the winning team were Dr. rer. nat. Jens König from Robert Bosch, Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Stefan Nolte from Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and Fraunhofer IOF, and Dr. sc. nat. Dirk Sutter from TRUMPF Laser. In the competitive nomination process, CEOs or chairmen of German scientific and business institutions proposed up to three projects to the German President's Office. In a series of meetings, the jury categorizes the submissions and decides on the three or four innovations that will make it to the final round based on innovative research and marketablility. The prize is endowed with Euro 250,000 and is one of Germany's most prestigious science awards.

Other teams in the competition included Coherent LaserSystems (Göttingen), which developed a pulsed UV laser system to produce large, thin layers of polysilicon to be used in high-resolution mobile displays for smartphones and tablets. And a team from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Munich) and Philips Technologie (Aachen) that has developed an energy-saving solid-state chemistry for white light-emitting LEDs.