SUPPLEMENT LASER World of PHOTONICS
50 years of LASER: Platform for the pioneers of photonics
O
n May 16, 1960, US researchers created a laser beam for the fi rst time. Just 13 years later, Messe München off ered a
platform for this innovative technology. Since the event LASER’s premiere in 1973 with 100 exhibitors, it has developed into the world’s leading trade fair for photonics components, systems and applications, or LASER World of PHOTONICS. Fifty years later, Messe München established yet another platform for an innovative technology with great potential: the World of QUANTUM. This will take place at the end of June 2023 together with LASER World of PHOTONICS and Automatica, to be held simultaneously, and the World of Photonics Congress in Munich. It was just a thousandth of a second, but the “deep red beam of coherent light” that US physicist Theodore Harold Maiman created in his California laboratory in 1960, would go on to change the world in the long run. That’s because, since this fi rst millisecond, laser technology has revolutionised the fi elds of medicine, microscopy, measurement and sensor technology, industrial manufacturing, information and communication technology, electronics, printing technology, aerospace, research and many more. Nevertheless, its technological and economic potential is still far from being exhausted.
Maiman himself may have called lasers “a solution in search of a problem”, but any initial doubts have vanished. As an enabling technology, photonics is driving progress everywhere today. According to market forecasts, the industry’s total global revenue will increase to more than €900 billion by 2025.
Pioneers platform This development was hard to foresee at the start of the 1970s. Nevertheless, a team under Gerd vom Hoevel, Managing Director of Messe München at the time, was so impressed by the potential of this new technology that they launched the world’s fi rst trade fair for lasers. Despite all detractors, 100 international exhibitors came to LASER in 1973. A mere 13 years
14 May 2023 | Automation
after Maiman’s groundbreaking lab experiment, this step demonstrated a pioneering spirit. However, the congress program accompanying the premiere showed that the then visionary founding of the trade fair was based on realistic assessments of the technology: In the days of the VW Beetle and mechanical typewriters, the seminars dealt with the potential of lasers in data technology, optical communications, medicine, material processing and measurement and environmental technology. What were then seen as future fi elds are now worth billions. Lasers are just as irreplaceable in data centres, IC manufacturing, automotive, battery and fuel cell factories as well as medicine and research.
Meeting in Munich In 1985, LASER World of PHOTONICS attracted over 10,000 visitors to Munich for the fi rst time. Two years after moving to the new exhibition grounds in Munich Riem in 1999, the event was renamed. By then, the world of photonics indeed came together at LASER – especially since the World of Photonics Congress was added in 2005. As a congress of superlatives, which bundles up to seven specialist conferences alongside the trade fair, it alone attracts thousands of experts from
the international photonics community. Many Nobel Prize winners have impressed the experts here with lectures. An unforgettable experiment was carried out by Arthur Leonard Schawlow in 1977, who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize; he used a hand laser to remove the writing on an infl ated balloon inside a second one, without bursting either of them – an early proof of the fl exibility and performance of light as a contactless tool. Thirty years later, in 2007, curiosity about this all-powerful tool attracted more than 1,000 exhibitors and over 25,000 trade visitors – with the year before, LASER celebrating its successful premiere in China. Five years later, in 2012, Messe München expanded into Mumbai, India. And from June 2023, the co-location with the world’s leading trade fair for intelligent automation and robotics – Automatica – will open up new opportunities for the LASER community to network along the innovation lines of modern worlds of production.
History repeating itself
Although the economic and technological potential of photonics was by no means clear in 1973, Messe München created a platform on which the international pioneers of this technology could present their systems, components and ideas. The bedrock of that global industry network was also formed at that time, without which the success story of photonics would hardly be imaginable. Now, history will repeat itself with the
World of QUANTUM, which celebrated its premiere during LASER World of PHOTONICS 2022, and will off er pioneers of quantum technologies a stage for their innovations and ideas, as well as a platform for networking with the global community at its second edition from June 27th to 30th, 2023. Though still vague now, too, there are signs of a future multi-billion market.
CONTACT:
LASER World of PHOTONICS
www.world-of-photonics.com
automationmagazine.co.uk
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