In addition to PhAST/Laser Focus World Innovation Award winner BioPhotonic Solutions, four honorable mentions were awarded. We videotaped each honorable mention company at CLEO/IQEC, asking them to explain just why their individual products were so innovative.
This year's honorable mentions are (in no particular order): IPG Photonics (Oxford, MA) for its YLS-5000-SM, 5 kilowatt Single-Mode Industrial Fiber Laser, a turn-key production fiber laser with near-perfect beam quality for precise materials and microelectronics processing; Kapteyn-Murnane Laboratories (KMLabs; Boulder, CO) for the XUUS tabletop extreme ultraviolet (EUV) source that converts ultrafast amplifier systems to the EUV wavelength region for applications in nanoscale science, lithography, 3-D imaging, and molecular dynamics; Orbits Lightwave (Pasadena, CA) for its Slow Light Laser Oscillator, an all-fiber oscillator that uses slow light to achieve extremely narrow linewidth and negligible noise for coherent communications, sensing, and research; and finally, TOPTICA Photonics AG (Munich, Germany) for iChrome, a user-friendly, widely tunable visible fiber laser for fluorophore excitation and other applications in microscopy and spectroscopy.
Each year, representatives from the Photonic Applications, Systems and Technology (PhAST) program at CLEO/IQEC and Laser Focus World (Nashua, NH) look for a product or service that will have a long-term impact within our industry; something that will not be easily replaced by other technologies and represents a breakthrough, novel idea with a strong patent position that enables a particular set of applications to flourish. For more information, go to www.phastconference.org/innovation.
