Lasers that fire for as little as a ten billionth of a second provide advantages with many materials, such as no heat affected zones or melting with cold ablation, as revealed at a recent AILU workshop. Rob Coppinger reports These fast lasers, lasers that fire, or pulse, as quickly as ten or millionths of a billionth of a second, were a focus of the Association of Laser Users’ (AILU) annual 'Ultra precision laser manufacturing systems, technologies and applications workshop'. Held on 13 September at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Industrial Photonics, users and suppliers of laser systems heard about fast lasers micro machining thin films, metals, polymers and glass for the medical, microelectronics and other sectors. Toughened glass and OLED thin films both have large markets in mobile computing and phones and were the subject of presentations at the AILU meeting.
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