I just returned from LASER Munich 2011. This is the largest event in our industry held every other year in Munich Germany. As you can tell from our ever growing product portfolio many of our partner companies are based in Europe and many of those in Germany.

The show gave us a great opportunity to see what was new both with our partner companies and also with the Laser industry in general. I will try to summarize what I saw as new and exciting.

Our partner company Xiton released a pulsed 224 nm laser with 300mW output power. The main driver for this technology is to replace large water cooled ion lasers used for writing gratings in fiber.

Another partner company we represent, ALS, released a 510 nm version of their popular picosecond diode laser systems for time correlated single photon counting and detector calibration.

LASOS presented a 640 nm DPSS laser with single longitudinal mode operation at 30, 50 and 100mW.

Eagleyard released a 800mW single mode laser diode at 808nm.

Other interesting technologies we viewed form non-partner companies included, 500mW 488 nm CW fiber lasers; doubled diode lasers at 547 nm, 559 nm and 589 nm; three wavelength PM fiber combiner.