REPORT: LASER PROCESSING IN LITHUANIA


PHOTONICS FROM VILNIUS: SHOWCASING LITHUANIA’S LASER EXPERTISE


Vilnius, and Lithuania in general, has a laser industry with plenty of room for growth


Matthew Dale reports from an EPIC meeting on laser material processing in Vilnius, and discovers that the Lithuanian capital has a lot to offer in terms of photonics expertise


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ithuania as an independent state is only 26 years old – it declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1990. As such, ‘there are not many companies older than


20 years,’ explains Marius Pilkauskas, CEO of Lithuanian optics firm Altechna. Pilkauskas was speaking at the start of a


European Photonics Industry Consortium (EPIC) meeting on lasers and material processing in the country’s capital Vilnius. Altechna, which was founded in 1996, hosted the event from 7 to 9 September, alongside Workshop of Photonics – until 2007 Altechna’s R&D arm, but now a separate entity performing micromachining feasibility studies. Te meeting, which gathered around 60


photonics executives, aimed, in part, to showcase the capabilities of Lithuanian photonics, a market that is young, but technically excellent. Vilnius is one of Lithuania’s hubs for photonics


LASER SYSTEMS EUROPE ISSUE 33 • WINTER 2016


technology. Te country has a history of laser science that dates back 50 years through its research institutes. Today its universities have strong programmes in physics and engineering, with every sixth student in Lithuania studying either physics, engineering or computer science – a total of 22,000 students in 2015-2016. In 2015, 640 specialists were employed in Lithuania’s laser industry, with one in 10 of these holding a PhD. ‘Te competition [in Lithuania] is excellent,’


Eric Mottay, president and CEO of ultrafast laser producer Amplitude Systèmes, said during the meeting. ‘You have a very strong research and application environment, very strong universities, some good research and a good supply of talented people. Here exists a network – not a huge network, it’s still a small size by most standards – of closely related companies with a high technical level.’ Many Lithuanian photonics companies


originated from a university background – Light Conversion, which manufactures ultrafast light sources and also hosted one of the days of the meeting, has its roots at Vilnius University Laser Research Centre. Te company, along with fellow Lithuanian


ultrafast laser firm, Ekspla, both supplied equipment for the Extreme Light Infrastructure Attosecond Light Pulse Source (ELI-ALPS) currently under construction in Hungary.


Lynn Sheehan, global director of applications


at fibre laser company NLight, said at the meeting that Lithuanian photonics has changed a lot. ‘My initial work in Lithuania showed that, going back years, they didn’t quite understand the scale of the laser market outside their region,’ he remarked. ‘And so in the first interactions [with Lithuanian companies] there was a lot of educating around the fact that when companies adopt the technologies [produced in Lithuania] they are expected to turn on in volume, and produce that volume. ‘What I see now is that the companies have


invested in facilities and people, and actually have the infrastructure to sell on a global scale, and that was an important step forward for Lithuanian companies,’ he added. Funding in Lithuania has been directed


towards building university-based co-operative research centres where laser companies and customers can interact. A total of €276 million was invested in open R&D infrastructure in 2015, and the average monthly cost of an R&D centre with 55 employees is among the lowest in Europe, at €91,000. Integrated Optics and Brolis Semiconductors


are two companies that were established soon aſter their founders leſt university, developing technologies that originated as part of PhD research. Brolis – which means ‘brothers’ in


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