News in brief

17 Jun 2002

German lasers, OLED advances and entanglement tricks feature in this week's update.

Industrial laser manufacturer LG Laser Technologies, Germany, has opened a regional office in Singapore to serve the increasing demand for laser solutions in the semiconductor, electronic, medical and biotechnology markets in Asia. Dominique Pfaff will head up the office as sales and marketing director, Asia. "Having recognized the importance of the Asian market we chose Singapore as our base because it provides the required infrastructure and technological facilities. Singapore also has interesting growth figures in the photonics industry," explained Markus Klenk, president of LG Laser.

Unique m.o.d.e, German manufacturer of high-power diode laser systems, is claiming the highest brightness in the industry for its latest system. The laser offers more than 5.2 W at 975 nm from a 50 micrometer fiber. "This is about 10 times as bright as commonly available laser diode systems," said the company's sales manager Albrecht von Pfeil. The brightness was achieved by polarization coupling two beam-shaped, broad-area laser diodes.

Researchers Daryl Smith and Ian Campbell at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US have proven a method for creating more electrically efficient organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). They applied an intermediate self-assembling chemical monolayer between the conducting layer and the polymer layer that emits the light and successfully achieved a more efficient electrical flow between the layers. The scientists presented their ideas at the 222nd national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Chicago, US.

Antia Lamas-Linares and co-workers at the University of Oxford, UK, have exploited quantum effects to boost the number of entangled photons created when an ultraviolet laser passes through a crystal (A Lamas-Linares et al., 2001 Nature, 412 887). The phenomenon could lead to a reliable method for creating such pairs, which could be the basis of future quantum computers and encryption techniques. The full story is available on PhysicsWeb.

Scientists from the UK and Japan may have taken one step further toward the reality of fusion energy. Dr Ryosuke Kodama and collagues at Osaka University and a UK team of researchers from five different institutes devised a new scheme of fast ignition using nine, high-intensity laser beams and a cone-shaped core in the material to be ignited. This cone shape enabled the laser beam to trigger a stable explosion of the plasma, which was followed by an equal and opposite implosion to create the extreme pressure and temperature required to initiate the fusion reaction.

SPIE The International Society for Optical Engineering has opened a European satellite office in Cardiff, UK. Recognizing that nearly half of the 27 international meetings held by SPIE in 2001 will be outside the US, SPIE saw a need for a presence closer to many of its members. The office will be opened and staffed by Karin Burger.