Technology commercialization, laser

In December 1975, the DOE s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory conducted a two-day symposium to launch a formal effort in laser technology commercialization. The purpose was to consolidate information and to transfer practical technology to industry from the Lab s laser fusion program. The technologies included optical... 

Advances in laser technology now allow for solid-state lasers of high beam quality. These beams may be projected from a much smaller auxiliary telescope, which negates the need for optical switching and completely eliminates any main telescope fluorescence. Solid-state YAG lasers are the most common type of lasers commercially available. These lasers use a crystal as the lasing... 

These limitations have recently been eliminated using solid-state sources of femtosecond pulses. Most of the femtosecond dye laser technology that was in wide use in the late 1980s [11] has been rendered obsolete by three technical developments the self-mode-locked Ti-sapphire oscillator [23,24,21, 26 and 22], the chirped-pulse, solid-state amplifier (CPA) [28,29, 30 and 31], and the non-collinearly pumped optical parametric amplifier (OPA) [32, 33 and 34]. Moreover, although a number of investigators still construct home-built systems with narrowly chosen capabilities, it is now possible to obtain versatile, nearly state-of-the-art apparatus of the type described below from commercial sources. Just as home-built NMR spectrometers capable of multidimensional or solid-state spectroscopies were still being home built in the late 1970s and now are almost exclusively based on commercially prepared apparatus, it is reasonable to expect that ultrafast spectroscopy in the next decade will be conducted almost exclusively with apparatus from commercial sources based around entirely solid-state systems. 

As already indicated in Chapter 7, the introduction of laser technology has already had a major impact on light-scattering methods. These have found particular application in the development of new methods of particle sizing, and several instruments are now available commercially which arc designed for the automatic determination of particle size distributions. These methods are being developed steadily, especially in terms of the associated computer software needed for the rapid analysis of experimental data. In particular, while the measurement of the particle size in monodisperse systems is well established, the mathematical analysis for polydisperse systems and for non-spherical particles presents problems which are not yet fully solved. 

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