
As an optical fiber manufacturer itself (including ytterbium designs for ultrafast fiber lasers), NKT's input to the panel will be well-informed. With all the buzz about fiber lasers, Coherent's senior VP/GM for Commercial Lasers and Components will no doubt describe how the company is capitalizing on the intense use of lasers in materials processing applications. In this year's 2014 Laser Market Review & Forecast to be published in the January 2014 issue (see the 2013 laser report here), we talk quite a bit about how lasers enable materials processing applications such as cell-phone manufacturing.
The question is, what types of lasers perform which materials processing tasks better? Are fiber lasers the only game in town, or will disk lasers or direct-diode lasers edge out fiber lasers in the end? One thing is for sure--fiber lasers from IPG and Raydiance can drill one heck of a nice hole in aerospace components and fuel injectors:
Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)
Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.