News

The LASER World of PHOTONICS Industry Days took place from June 21 to 24, 2021. With this online event, Messe München – organizer of the world's largest trade show for applied laser technology and photonics – offered its community a high-quality program including market overviews, trend analyses and panel discussions. Industrial laser technology today and tomorrow was one focus of the program.

Ultrafast lasers have become a standard manufacturing tool for the display industry, with even more and even larger applications coming in the next few years. The technology and processes needed for these new applications were presented at the 6th “UKP-Workshop: Ultrafast Laser Technology”, held by the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT in Aachen on April 21 and 22, 2021. Their spectrum ranged from ultra-powerful beam sources to processes that can be used to enlarge the surface of a metal electrode, for the generation of hydrogen, a thousand times.

In the Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence Advanced Photon Sources CAPS, 13 Fraunhofer Institutes bundle their expertise for the development of laser systems that reach highest powers with ultrashort pulses and the exploration of their application potentials. The Fraunhofer Institutes for Laser Technology ILT in Aachen and for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF in Jena contribute their competence in the development of high-power ultrafast lasers, which is combined in the cluster with the expertise of other Fraunhofer Institutes in the fields of systems technology and applications.

The ultrashort pulse (USP) laser has been known to shine whenever highly sensitive material needs to be machined quickly yet gently. The Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT has investigated one such application that certainly looks to have a bright future: The Aachen-based researchers developed a quick, reliable and nondestructive method of ablating lithium-ion batteries’ anode material with an ultrashort pulsed laser beam. This ablation technique exposes electrical contact points called tabs.

The development of the world's most precise clock is the ambitious goal of the “Thorium Nuclear Clock” project, in which Fraunhofer-CAPS scientist Dr. Johannes Weitenberg is involved. Conventional atomic clocks on the effect of the characteristic frequency of radiation transitions in the electron shell. The Thorium Nuclear Clock, on the other hand, uses effects in the atomic nucleus.

In October 2019, the core institutes of the Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence Advanced Photon Sources CAPS visited the Japanese laser manufacturer GIGAPHOTON Inc. at their site in Oyama-shi, Japan. GIGAPHOTON develops, manufactures and sales excimer laser used for lithography tools in semiconductor manufacturing and for other uses, and EUV light sources.

On September 16, 2019, more than 20 Ph.D. students and scientists exchanged ideas on topics related to laser technology and systems engineering at the CAPS Summer School. A comprehensive lecture program from theory to application served as the basis for the scientific interchange. The CAPS Summer School was organized by the partner institute Fraunhofer IOF in Jena. Doctoral students from all 13 partner institutes were invited.

On 17 September 2019, the application laboratory in Aachen was officially opened. As part of the Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence Advanced Photon Sources CAPS, laboratories are being set up in Aachen at the Fraunhofer ILT and in Jena at the Fraunhofer IOF – the User Facility.

On September 16, 2019, Fraunhofer CAPS will host the Summer School for PhD students and all scientists from Fraunhofer institutes associated with Fraunhofer CAPS. The Summer School offers a broad spectrum of lectures on laser technology and systems engineering as well as exciting insights into their applications.

In the 70th year of its history, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is ideally positioned for the challenges of the future, a strategy it also demonstrated at LASER World of PHOTONICS, the world's leading photonics trade fair in Munich. The Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT, for example, presented state-of-the-art technology for quantum technologies, metallic 3D printing and electromobility.