How-to book published on laser beam-shaping applications

Following up on their well-received first book, Laser Beam Shaping: Theory and Techniques, Sandia National Laboratories researchers Fred Dickey and Scott Holswade have edited (with David Shealy of the University of Alabama at Birmingham) a compact new volume, Laser Beam Shaping Applications.

The attractively packaged, 357-page volume offers readers the thoughts of 19 prominent practitioners who share their in-depth knowledge of how to shape laser beams to optimize their utility and improve their future development.

Contributors hail from sites as diverse as Moscow, Pretoria, Rochester, and Albuquerque.

In nine illustrated chapters, the authors — leaders in their respective specialties — discuss how to improve illuminators for microlithography, array-type laser printing systems, and excimer laser image systems, as well as optical data storage, isotope separation, shaping via flexible mirrors, and spectral control of spatially dispersive lasers. There is also a review of the modern field of beam-shaping.

The final chapter contains a history of beam shaping that began thousands of years ago with Assyrians in northern Iraq who had developed “a small oval, polished rock crystal in the shape of a plano-convex lens about one-quarter inch thick.” The chapter also discusses the contributions of Archimedes, who is said to have arranged parabolic mirrors that would quickly sink wooden ships by burning holes in them.

Extensive references offer opportunities for more in-depth study. The book, published by the Taylor & Francis Group, is 102nd in its optical science and engineering titles.

Recognizing the remarkable lack of acknowledgments to engineers in the modern world (despite the fact that their achievements are everywhere), the authors dedicate their second volume “to the many unrecognized researchers who developed key methods and applications of beam shaping. They innovated quietly to maintain legitimate corporate advantage, so their names are largely unknown.”

Soure: Sandia National Laboratories

Related stories:

Physicists Transmit Light through Opaque Materials
No matter how thick an opaque "scattering material" is, physicists have shown how to weave light through tiny open channels in the material, so that the light passes through on the other side.
More flexibility for lasers
Until now, industrial lasers have been able to perform only one specific task effectively – they are generally good at either hardening, cutting or welding metal. Moreover, they are often bulky and unwieldy. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology IWS in Dresden will be presenting a real multi-talent at Laser2007 in Munich: a fiber laser system that is capable of hardening, cutting, and even welding if required.
Season's Greetings at the Speed of Light
MIT presents an ultrafast holiday offering

Most days, MIT chemist Keith Nelson and his team do cutting-edge research with femtosecond laser pulses—flashes of light that last about a thousandth-of-a-trillionth (10-15) of a second, or roughly the amount of time it takes a light beam to cross from one circuit feature to the next in a conventional computer chip.
And most days, the scientists are focused on the serious, long-term applications of their work, which include a variety of potential uses in fundamental science, as well as in communications and signal-processing technologies.
Laser Wakefield Acceleration: Channeling the Best Beams Ever
Researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have taken a giant step toward realizing the promise of laser wakefield acceleration, by guiding and controlling extremely intense laser beams over greater distances than ever before to produce high-quality, energetic electron beams.

Long-Lasting Quantum Memory Leads to Long-Distance Quantum Communication
(PhysOrg.com) -- Physicists have taken a step closer to realizing long-distance quantum communication, in which a quantum state is transferred from one location to another by becoming entangled with a traveling photon.
Sensing the Energy: Calibrating the LCLS
The Linac Coherent Light Source will generate X-rays 10 billion times brighter than any source before it. Being the first of its kind, the LCLS has presented engineers with a number of unique technical hurdles. Measuring just how much punch the LCLS beam actually packs has proved especially challenging. But a team of LCLS scientists and engineers led by Stephan Friedrich at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has solved the problem with a tiny sensor designed to confront the beam head on.
Researchers develop world's fastest bar code reader
(PhysOrg.com) -- Building on a series of recent breakthroughs in ultrafast analog-to-digital conversion, UCLA engineers have designed a bar code reader that is nearly a thousand times faster than any device currently in use.
Light throws a curve ball
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the University of St Andrews have made a surprise discovery using light beams that can travel around corners.