Historic Lasers Find New Life in Niche Applications
With all the hoopla surrounding new high-brightness lasers such as disk and fiber, some think the death knell is sounding for CO2, lamp-pumped and other older, well-established types. However, the lack of a one-size-fits-all laser means these classics are far from giving up the ghost. In the years since the introduction of high-power disk and fiber lasers, we have witnessed not only the resilience of the historic industrial lasers, but also enormous advances in direct-diode lasers. In f...
Photonics Spectra, September 2011