In addition to PhAST/Laser Focus World Innovation Award winner BioPhotonic Solutions, four honorable mentions were awarded. We videotaped each honorable mention company at CLEO/IQEC, asking them to explain just why their individual products were so innovative.
This year's honorable mentions are (in no particular order): IPG Photonics (Oxford, MA) for its YLS-5000-SM, 5 kilowatt Single-Mode Industrial Fiber Laser, a turn-key production fiber laser with near-perfect beam quality for precise materials and microelectronics processing; Kapteyn-Murnane Laboratories (KMLabs; Boulder, CO) for the XUUS tabletop extreme ultraviolet (EUV) source that converts ultrafast amplifier systems to the EUV wavelength region for applications in nanoscale science, lithography, 3-D imaging, and molecular dynamics; Orbits Lightwave (Pasadena, CA) for its Slow Light Laser Oscillator, an all-fiber oscillator that uses slow light to achieve extremely narrow linewidth and negligible noise for coherent communications, sensing, and research; and finally, TOPTICA Photonics AG (Munich, Germany) for iChrome, a user-friendly, widely tunable visible fiber laser for fluorophore excitation and other applications in microscopy and spectroscopy.
Each year, representatives from the Photonic Applications, Systems and Technology (PhAST) program at CLEO/IQEC and Laser Focus World (Nashua, NH) look for a product or service that will have a long-term impact within our industry; something that will not be easily replaced by other technologies and represents a breakthrough, novel idea with a strong patent position that enables a particular set of applications to flourish. For more information, go to www.phastconference.org/innovation.
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.