Laserati

"Plausible deniability" is an added benefit of laser weapons according to US Air Force Research Laboratory. via: NewScientist

Cynthia Kaiser, chief engineer of the US Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate, used the phrase "plausible deniability" to describe the weapon's benefits in a briefing (powerpoint format) on laser weapons to the New Mexico Optics Industry Association in June.

John Corley, director of USAF's Capabilities Integration Directorate, used the same phrase to describe the weapon's benefits at an Air Armament Symposium in Florida in October 2007 (see page 15, pdf format).

As the term suggests, "plausible deniability" is used to describe situations where those responsible for an event could plausibly claim to have had no involvement in it.

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The ultrafast laser market will reach about $260 million in 2008, with healthy growth expected through to 2012 according to analyst Strategies Unlimited.

I have noticed in previous laser conferences that there are more and more companies producing on ultrafast fiber lasers. A recent report by Strategies Unlimited is on this topic. The report is not freely available. But we can know something from this interview from optics.org. The interview article is free, but you have to register. Following is the part that is most interesting to me.

How does the ultrafast market sustain such a large number of players?

There are now 38 companies offering an ultrafast laser product. In my opinion, that's a bit too many, especially when you consider that Coherent and Newport have the dominant market shares today. It is a lot more than I expected when we started looking into this project, but a lot of companies survive by serving a niche and with very tight financing. Many of them do this by offering ultrafast as an extension of their other pulsed laser products. What is surprising is how many of these little companies have been around for many years. Only a very few can be considered start-up companies entirely focused on ultrafast.

Do you expect to see new entrants and what do they have to do to survive?

When it comes to the laser business, you always see new entrants, but the venture-funded start-up is a very tough way to go, because the application development is so slow. The supplier must find a customer to design the laser into a system, and then the system has to be sold to end users. In between, there may be regulatory hurdles and extensive qualifications. It's easier to do if the laser supplier has a tight budget, lots of patience and maybe some other products already selling.

Do you expect to see any consolidation?

"Consolidation" is not the word that comes to my mind, at least not in the sense of a significant reduction in the number of suppliers. There are no strong economies of scale in the ultrafast business that would force that. The intellectual property is critical, though, so there certainly will be some licensing and even acquisitions to get access to that. I don't consider that consolidation - that is just the usual business of horse trading.

I found this presentation on Google Video: Active galactic nuclei with laser guide star adaptive optics. It is from the AAS 212th Meeting. The presenter is Claire Max.

Adaptive optics on the current generation of 8 - 10 meter telescopes yields spatial resolutions in the near-infrared comparable to those of Hubble at visible wavelengths. Laser guide stars are now making these high spatial resolutions available over a large fraction of the sky. I will describe several areas in which these advances are being applied to AGN science: 1) measurement of black hole masses in nearby galaxies from kinematics of stars and gas; 2) study of the spatial distribution of stellar populations and dust in galaxies at 0.5 < z < 1.5, and 3) tests of the relationship between galaxy mergers and AGN activity. I will conclude with a discussion of the planned Next Generation Adaptive Optics system at the W. M. Keck Observatory, outlining the expected improvements in AGN science with this new system.

The authors of the time lapse movie are Stéphane Guisard, Valère Leroy and Jean Pajus. It is fun to see the PARSEC laser pointing to different directions of the universe over the night. I wonder what the night sky would look like in Hawaii, where there are several guide star lasers.

This is a time lapse movie made from individual images taken with a Canon 20Da camera and a 8mm lens. This accelerated movie shows a complete night at Paranal Observatory starting at sunset and finishing at dawn. That night, the Laser Guide Star Facility was in use and its yellow sodium Laser beam left its footprint on our movie. The laser beam creates a Laser Guide Star in the high atmosphere, 90 km above us. This ‘bright’ artificial star helps the adaptive optics system located in the main telescope, to measure and correct the distorsions of the images produced by the atmosphere, in real time and several hundreds of times per second.

The bright part of the Milky Way, containing the galactic center, is disappearing to the west on the left hand side of the movie. The Andromeda galaxy is visible also, as a diffused and elongated spot crossing the sky just above the domes. One can also see the Pleiades and “upside down” Orion constellation rising (remember this movie is done from the Southern hemisphere) together with the other half of our Milky Way . Finally the moon lightens the morning sky just before sunrise.

We have a new publication online now: multiwatts narrow linewidth fiber Raman amplifiers. Basically, the paper shows fiber Raman amplifier can be used to amplify narrow linewidth laser to a useful power level, while linewidth keeping narrow. This would be a surprise to most laser researchers. In this specific report, we have obtained 4.8 W, ~10MHz 1178nm laser with 27dB gain and more than 10% efficiency. The tricks and reason are explained in the paper.

William Bennett, pioneering laser researcher, died from cancer of the esophagus at 78. Via: Boston Global

In 1960, Bennett, Ali Javan and Donald Herriott built the first gas laser, which generated a continuous infrared beam from a mixture of helium and neon, at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. Bennett would go on to develop nearly a dozen additional lasers.
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Bennett became a tenured professor at Yale University in 1962, was named Charles Baldwin Sawyer professor in applied science and physics in 1972 and would spend 38 years at the school, becoming an emeritus professor in 1998 and retiring in 2000.

He is not only a laser physicist. On Yale website:

Professor Bennett was co-inventor of the first gas laser (the helium-neon laser), discovered the argon ion laser, was first to observe spectral hole burning effects in gas lasers, and created a theory of hole burning effects on laser oscillation. He was co-discoverer of lasers using electron impact excitation in each of the noble gases, dissociative excitation transfer in the neon-oxygen laser (the first chemical laser), and collision excitation in several metal vapor lasers. He was one of the first to incorporate the use of computers to teach physics and, with his daughter Dr. Jean Bennett Maguire, devised a method of real-time spectral phonocardiography for the detection and classification of heart murmurs. He set a stringent limit on the existence of “The Fifth Force” and showed that it was improbable that magnetic fields from power lines could cause cancer. Research he did on the physics of musical instruments became the basis of a popular course he gave at Yale. He has written eight books, twelve patents and over 120 research papers. His principal avocation is playing chamber music. He studied the clarinet with Simeon Bellison and has been clarinet soloist with several amateur symphony orchestras.

An update from OSA Podcast, on career in Optics. Worth listening.

Do you know how to use your membership in a professional society to its full benefit? Do you sometimes wonder what direction your life will take once you have decided to go into industry or academia? When you are looking at the long lists of publications that other people have accumulated, do you ponder your ability to achieve a publications list as prolific? In May 2008 at the CLEO/QELS conference in San Jose, California, four well-known OSA members gathered together to talk about these topics and to share tips from their own lives to benefit the young professionals who are now where they once were.

Career Podcast Part 1
Career Podcast Part 2

Berthold Leibinger Stiftung offers two prizes dedicated on applied laser technology. The Berthold Leibinger Innovationspreis honors advancements in the application or generation of laser light, while the Berthold Leibinger Zukunftspreis honors research milestones regarding the application or generation of laser light.

The jury includes the following members: Stephen Anderson Associate Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Laser Focus World Prof. Dr. med. Hans-Peter Berlien Chief Physician of the Laser Medical Department, Elisabeth Hospital Berlin Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hubertus Christ President of the DVT – German Federation of Technical and Scientific Associations Prof. Dr. Theodor Hänsch Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics Prof. Dr.-Ing. Helmut Hügel University of Stuttgart, Institute for High-Power Beam Technologies Prof. Dr. Ursula Keller Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Institute of Quantum Electronics Prof. Dr. med. John Stuart Nelson Medical Director of the Beckmann Laser Institute Prof. Dr. Hans-Jürgen Quadbeck-Seeger Former Research Executive Director of BASF AG Prof. Dr. Orazio Svelto Technical University of Milan, Department of Physics Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hans-Jürgen Warnecke Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation

May 16, 2008. Above is today’s Google logo.

The first working laser was demonstrated on May 16, 1960 by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories.

According to Wikipedia.

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