Article Abstracts | March 2008
The complete article appears in the March 2008 issue of Photonics Spectra. If you do not have a copy of this issue,
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What’s Next for Solid-State Lasers?
At the 2008 Advanced Solid-State Photonics conference, experts report on the latest
technology developments.
by Breck Hitz, Senior Technical Editor
Advanced Solid-State Photonics (ASSP) 2008 was held Jan. 27 to 30 in the Noh Theatre of the Nara Prefectural New Public Hall in Japan. It was the first time the conference had been held in Japan, and it produced a host of intriguing papers on topics ranging from the manufacturing of automobiles to ultrafast amplifiers. What follows is a description of a subset of those papers, to give the reader a flavor of the happenings at this year’s conference.
In a plenary paper, Kazuhisa Mikame, a project manager in the Production Engineering Development Div. of Toyota Motor Corp. of Toyota City, Japan, described how laser welding has been integrated throughout the company’s manufacturing process. Altogether, the company uses more than 300 lasers in building its automobiles, he said...
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