Industrial applications command top-tier photonics

JAKE SALTZMAN, EDITOR JAKE.SALTZMAN@PHOTONICS.COM

The relationship between industrial applications — mainstays such as materials processing, quality control, and chemical analysis — and photonic solutions is hardly steeped in mystery. By the time Bell Labs’ Kumar Patel introduced his first iteration of the CO₂ laser 60 years ago, society had fully committed to, walked back, and then reassessed the notion of tying its collective growth to advancements of the factory.

Despite the absence of any question of “what came first,” there is still a chicken-and-egg element to the industrial applications-photonics dynamic. Simply, photonic innovation drives progress in industry. And industrial applications ensure a continuous stream of photonic innovation.

Patel’s CO₂ laser transformed industrial cutting and engraving. Then again, automobile manufacturing in the mid-1960s, for example, must have presented the ideal environment for a cutting laser to experience widespread adoption and undergo wave after wave of performance improvements.

This symbiosis holds true today. In the machine vision sector, imaging systems spend full life cycles inside the factory. From the fabrication of their components to their ultimate deployment for processes inspection, these systems are designed in industrial settings, for industrial settings.

Similarly, in manufacturing, the combination of lasers and laser optics underscores the reality that photonics products and methods enable applications in sectors that range from aerospace and defense to dentistry. Numerous disciplines require chemical and/or gas analysis. Many rely on laser-based techniques to streamline operations and ensure the safety of human (and, increasingly, automated) workers in the field.

In this issue, contributing editors Marie Freebody and Michael Eisenstein detail how advancements in three pillars of photonics in action — components, systems, and processes — shape the narrative around high-energy optics and mid-IR sources here and here, respectively. As editorial coverage of industrial applications extends into only so much depth without a deep dive into sensors, Teledyne Imaging’s Rafael Romay-Juárez offers insight into the evolution of CMOS image sensor architectures here.

But the dynamic that exists between photonics and industrial applications is less defined by what we know now than by what we anticipate for the future. With data centers and AI already informing day-to-day decisions, we are right on time to wager projections for how cloud infrastructure might affect our factories, manufacturing plants, and distribution hubs. Through a focus on software control and programmability, iPronics Programmable Photonics establishes a photonic link to the data center and the future of work more broadly.

While we wonder what shape the future of industry may take, we find some certainty in knowing that photonics will be there as both an enabler and a beneficiary.

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