Good News!

Abstract

AbstractNow, with the old year fading, the first prognoses for the economic development come up. And the numbers look good: Arnold Mayer from Optech Consulting sees a new all time high in the market for laser materials systems with sales at 5.91 billion USD in 2005. After a decline between 2000 and 2003 the market has now recovered and further growth is expected (see p. 11 for more information). One big issue in the foreseeable future will be the development of new markets, particularly in Asia. Here in Europe, everybody is looking at China. In December 2005, a 10 billion Dollar deal with Chinese authorities was announced by Airbus. Just two weeks earlier, Boeing received an order over 4 billion USD from China. It looks as if the Chinese dragon is taking off. But how look things in the laser business? How does China compare with the established high tech markets in Asia? And how many domestic products are coming up? To answer all these questions we have prepared a special report on the Chinese laser market in this issue (page 12).Although Asia may be on the rise, Europe is still playing a leading part in the development of laser technology. It has an excellent structure for basic research and a number of companies making successful products on the basis of academic findings. This is particularly true for Germany with laser companies such as Trumpf or Rofin Sinar, which lead their markets for many years. On the other side, German universities are more and more suffering from budget cuts. The new German government has promised to raise funding but there is no agenda yet. More activity is going on at the European arena at the moment. On December 2nd, a new platform “Photonics21” has been founded in Brussels. Lead by the chairmen of companies like Jenoptik, Bookham, TRUMPF Lasertechnik, Carl Zeiss, Philips Lighting, SAGEM, this platform will formulate a European agenda for photonics and advise the European Commission for the next big funding plan, the 7. Framework Programme of the European Commission. FP 7 is valid for seven years and has a total funding budget of 72 billion Euro.Thinking about the use of lasers in industry you can generally distinguish between the processing tool and the device for measurement. In this issue we will focus on the latter one. After some decades of development of laser based measurement, technologies have become very diverse and it is even difficult to cover them by a single headline. Therefore it is very appropriate when Gerd Häusler and his co‐authors named their article “3D sensor zoo”. Nevertheless, holographic and interferometric techniques have become mature and found a widespread use from automotive industry to plastic surgery (p. 42), and all the issues of homeland security will further boost this fast and precise technology.