Seminar panel questions laser company executives

On February 3, 2014, Laser Focus World will once again present its annual Lasers & Photonics Marketplace Seminar (http://www.marketplaceseminar.com) in conjunction with SPIE Photonics West. Each year, we try to add a mixture of important topics presented by informed people in the photonics industry to make the presentations compelling to all attendees. This year, the Seminar (detailed in a video here from Conard Holton) will include the usual numbers presentation from Strategies Unlimited's Allen Nogee, a keynote from IQE and EPIC's Drew Nelson with a European perspective on the photonics marketplace, and an afternoon Executive Panel moderated by Nufern's Martin Seifert.

Recognizing that bellies will be full from lunch, Seifert will aim to make the afternoon Executive Panel discussion lively, eye-opening, and informative (hopefully, questions from the audience will keep it dynamic as well!). The panel features Peter Leibinger from Trumpf, Sri Venkat from Coherent, and Søren Isaksen from NKT--each a powerhouse in these major photonics and laser companies that will be tasked, per the description provided on the Seminar agenda, "to provide their perspectives on current markets, views on different technologies, and opinions about future challenges and opportunities for manufacturers and integrators of lasers and photonics products." As Seifert knows well, optical fiber is a critical photonics component in today's fiber laser technology. And as chairman of the board of directors for NKT's Photonics Group, Søren Isaksen can draw information from a number of successful product introductions from NKT in the past few years that wholly depend on state-of-the-art optical fiber technology, including its mid-infrared supercontinuum laser and its tunable deep-UV supercontinuum laser that was detailed in a video (link below):

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:

With Coherent betting on its 1 kW fiber laser to better tackle the materials processing markets, Trumpf continues to seek out opportunities for all lasers, unless mechanical tools do the job better and faster! Its position as a supplier of both laser and mechanical machine tools gives Trump a unique perspective on the laser markets that few laser companies enjoy. Lasers don't always fit the application, and Trumpf can be there to offer (and financially benefit from) ANY solution--not just a laser solution. No doubt you will learn about Trumpf's latest disk laser ambitions during the Executive Panel from Trumpf managing partner and president of the Laser and Electronics Division, Peter Leibinger. Peter personally inaugurated the third production facility in Japan for disk lasers in the middle of 2012 and is well-qualified to discuss the future of this and other laser/photonics innovations. We look forward to seeing you at the 2014 Lasers & Photonics Marketplace Seminar (http://www.marketplaceseminar.com) this year, so don't miss it. Your Executive Panel questions will be most welcome!