Spectra-Physics

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Spectra-Physics is a laser company founded in September 1961 in the USA (based in Mountain View , California until 2009 , and in Santa Clara, California since 2010 ), the first company to specialize entirely in lasers. It has been part of the Newport Corporation in Irvine (California) since 2004 .

The founders (Herbert M. Dwight, Robert Rempel, Arnold Bloom, Earl Bell) came from the environment of Varian Associates (a manufacturer of measuring instruments, for example NMR , EPR ) and Stanford University, and at the time of the founding, lasers were not that either Target that was only developed in the early 1960s (more precisely late 1960). However, they also wanted to avoid direct competition with Varian, which was very well equipped with patents and had been reluctant to see the departure of the founders of Spectra-Physics. In mid-1962, they presented the first gas laser in collaboration with Perkin-Elmer (building on the patents of the first gas laser developed at Bell Laboratories in 1960, the helium-neon laser ) and initially the division was a joint venture with Perkin-Elmer. Elmer. In addition, they initially had some research contracts with government organizations such as NASA in other areas.

In the early years, every employee also received shares in the company.

Their first product was an infrared gas laser, the Model 100. In 1962 they brought the first commercially available CW laser onto the market (Model 110, it operated in the visible spectral range) and in 1968 the first commercial laser with mode-locking . In 1976 they brought the first Nd: YAG laser with an unstable resonator onto the market (Quanta-Ray DCR 1).

In 1964 Earl Bell and Arnold Bloom invented the ion laser at Spectra-Physics (first mercury, then argon ), for which they received the basic patents and which formed the basis of their second generation of gas lasers.

In 1966, former members (Eugene Watson) founded Coherent .

In 1974 they introduced the first commercial barcode scanner . The bar codes division was taken over by PSC Inc. in 1996.

At the end of the 1970s, they turned to solid-state lasers and semiconductor lasers in addition to gas lasers. In 1983 they pioneered the introduction of high power diode lasers (SDL, Spectra Diode Laboratories, a joint venture with Xerox PARC, one of the founders was Donald Scifres ). In the 1980s and 1990s they developed a series of DPSS lasers.

In 1988 the industrial division went to Siemens, which it incorporated into Rofin-Sinar .

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References and comments

  1. ↑ Dwight was more entrusted with the business and Robert Rempel the driving personality
  2. ^ After the oral history interview from Dwight to the caretaker. That was a tradition among the founders - Rempel was able to raise the company's start-up capital, among other things, because he had bought Varian shares at an early stage.
  3. ↑ After Dwight's oral history interview, Watson and Rempel had more intense conflicts in 1964/65 that prompted Watson to found his own company
  4. ↑ They merged with JDS Uniphase in 2001