Regulatory Science and Laser Safety Research at the FDA

By Daniel X. Hammer, William Calhoun, Do-Hyun Kim, Robert James, Ilko K. Ilev and Victor Krauthamer The Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (FDA/CDRH) regulates medical devices and radiological products in the US. We approve new devices that are deemed to be safe and effective and clear for sale devices which […]

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Better Informing the Public of Laser Exposure Injury Potential

By Patrick Murphy and Greg Makhov As the costs of consumer lasers drop, and as beam powers increase, there is growing concern over misuse of pointers and of more powerful hand-held lasers. Pilots and others harassed by lasers are often worried about potential injuries to their eyes. Fortunately, it is more difficult than the general public […]

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Welding Characteristics of Foturan Glass Using Ultrashort Laser Pulses

By Isamu Miyamoto, Yasuhiro Okamoto, Kristian Cvecek, Michael Schmidt, Henry Helvajian While glass is widely used in different industrial field due to its excellent physical and chemical properties, there exist no reliable joining procedures of glass at the moment. We have developed a novel fusion welding procedure of glass that can weld glass even with […]

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Local Laser Joining of Glass and Silicon

By Assi Hansen, Isamu Miyamoto, Tiina Amberla, Yasuhiro Okamoto One of the most employed material combinations in microtechnology is the glass-silicon pair. Since the huge growth of the microelectromechanical devices, sensors and micro-fluidic devices, bonding of this couple has become more and more critical issue. Many of these glass-silicon bonding processes, for example anodic bonding, […]

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A Technical and Commercial Comparison of Fiber Laser and CO2 Laser Cutting

By John Powell, Alexander Kaplan Since the advent of commercial fiber and disk laser cutting machines, there has been a lot of controversy about the performance of these devices – particularly in comparison to their more established CO2 counterparts. In the early days, the sales staff promoting fiber technology would often declare that the new […]

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