If lasers helped to redefine many manufacturing operations, then ultrashort-pulsed (USP) lasers promise to revolutionize them. They can process almost any material, and they can do so with a precision that extends below micrometers. This advantage...

Ultrashort pulse lasers, such as femtosecond lasers, are becoming increasingly easy-to-use plug and play devices suitable for a wide range of industrial and biomedical applications. Fifteen years ago, these lasers were large mainframe affairs...

Commercial use of ultrashort-pulse lasers, and femtosecond pulsed lasers in particular, continues to rise, due to the ability of these sources to cleanly ablate material or tissue with minimal heating of and damage to surrounding areas, and with...

To say that femtosecond laser technology has undergone a transformation in recent years is an understatement that not only minimizes the huge strides made in technical terms, but especially so the improvements in accessibility. Complex tabletops...

The strongly bound and tightly packed crystal lattice that comprises diamond makes it an ideal candidate for extreme optical and photonic devices. Thanks to the unique combination of its outstanding thermal, mechanical, and optical properties,...

Femtosecond lasers have long been a workhorse in subtractive manufacturing, prized for their unique ability to athermally ablate materials. They are commonly used in surface structuring, drilling and thin-film scribing. However, few thought that a...

Of the numerous far-field imaging techniques, multiphoton microscopy has proved particularly valuable in many biological studies, providing multimodal images from deep within tissue, as well as label-free images of complex biological structures and...

In the more than two decades since a team of researchers from the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science at the University of Michigan first demonstrated the use of a femtosecond laser for micromachining1, this technology has clearly made its...

From the unbreakably hard to the vulnerably soft – from glass, metals and ceramics to plastics and biological tissue – femtosecond lasers are being increasingly adopted for micromachining a range of materials. Femtosecond lasers are...

Lasers can interact with matter in a variety of ways. Depending on the wavelength, the energy of the laser beam and a whole set of other parameters, such as pulse duration or repetition rate, laser photons have countless ways of mingling with the...

In a world where the micron has become the standard and competition is fiercer than ever, subnanosecond lasers may be just the answer for emerging industrial microprocessing applications. Femtosecond and picosecond laser sources, which have been...

As radiation sources become more efficient, detectors become more sensitive, and acquisition speeds up, terahertz computed tomography holds promise for nondestructively finding and distinguishing between different materials by visualizing spatial...

Despite nearly 50 years of study, laser damage continues to be a topic of some confusion for both optics manufacturers and consumers. Laser optics purchasers need to know the primary causes of damage and the steps that fabricators typically take to...

In a year that has seen the biggest recession in decades hit most market segments, you might expect a look back at the optics industry in 2009 to be all gloom and doom. But there a...

The drive for miniaturization in electronics, photonics and biomedical devices is spurring an ever-growing need for laser micromachining. Femtosecond laser pulses provide unique capabilities for producing features as small as a few tens of...