achievement award showed the trend, going to Uniphase (San Jose, CA) for a compact 100 m W diode-pumped doubled green laser. The following year's award, announced in January 1996, went to Lightwave Electronics (Mountain View, CA) for a singlemode 2 W diode-pumped green laser— 20 times more powerful than the previous year's winner. On the back cover of that issue, Spectra-Physics announced a 5 W diode-pumped green la- ser that ran on single-phase 110 V power.
The power of fiber lasers grew quietly in the shadow of the Bubble mania. In 1996, IPG Photonics (Oxford, MA), together with Polaroid, Spectra Diode Labs, and Spectra-Physics, introduced 10-W diode-pumped ytterbium-doped fiber la- sers. IPG reached 100 W in 2000, and in our August 2002 issue IPG founder Valentin Gapontsev described further ad- vances, including IPG's new 2 k W CW in- dustrial fiber laser "for heavy-duty metal-welding applications in the auto industry." The package was 1. 18 × 1. 1 × 0.6 m.
Fiber lasers had become an important part of the laser market by 2004, with sales reaching 2342 units worth $84 mil- lion, our January 2005 issue reported. Lamp-pumped lasers accounted for most of the dollars in solid-state sales, $644 million, but the 15,000 units fell short of the nearly 15,600 bulk diode-pumped lasers, with a total price of $270 million. The same issue reported an impressive technical achievement with Ti-sapphire, producing an intensity of 7 x 1021 W/ cm2 with a 30 fs, 1.4-J pulse.
was based on diode-pumped slab lasers.
2012. In 2010, I toured NIF while attending Photonics West, and was awed by its scale and complexity. I also was amazed to be able to buy a doubled green laser pointer for $15 at the show.
NIF reached 1. 8 MJ in March 2012 and had fired 1100 shots by the end of the year. However, in February 2013, we reported it had failed to reach ignition.