
Commercializing the first direct-diode laser bright enough to cut and weld metal - dalek2point3
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/startup-teradiode-invents-direct-diode-laser-bright-enough-to-cut-weld-0723
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InclinedPlane
This is huge, it means that laser cutters will be even cheaper than they are
now, and that much more ubiquitous. Laser cutters are already making their way
into small scale shops and hackerspaces, this'll just hasten that. But it also
has a ton of applications elsewhere. Likely it will lower the cost and
increase access to the minimum set of machine tools necessary to sustain a
developed economy, which has implications for the entirety of the developing
world as well as further afield in things like Mars colonization.

Additionally, it makes things such as low-footprint or modular factories,
configurable/programmable or wholly automated factories, and self-replicating
factories more of a possibility in the near future.

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Kliment
Yeah, that might happen, in 20 years when the patents expire. Before that,
this will be much higher cost than tube lasers which anyone can make and
repair.

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oh_sigh
What would be the point of a business inventing a laser that is cheaper and
more efficient than current lasers if they weren't going to be cheaper to own
than other lasers?

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Kliment
Reduced weight, reduced power consumption (power infrastructure is expensive
to set up even where power is cheap), reduced size, better reliability (diode
lasers have no loss of gas pressure issues), better power density. All reasons
to go for this setup even if it's much more expensive than gas lasers.

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quarterwave
Looks like multi-core asynchronous with load balancer wins even in the laser
world.

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madengr
Cool, but I wouldn't call it a single diode LASER since it is forming an
incoherent beam from several diodes. Now if you could get a single, coherent
beam at several kW, that would be really cool.

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danmaz74
So now we only need better batteries, and we'll soon be able to cut and weld
metal with our phone?? :D

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coder23
Wouldn't about 12kg of laptop batteries provide 4kW?( wikipedia: ~250-~340
W/kg ) Put them in a backpack.

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VLM
My limited experience with lasers is the heatsink problem is significant, so
worry about dissipating a couple KW of heat in your hand or backpack, not
carrying around a mere couple KWh of energy.

I imagine it would sound and feel much like holding an industrial heat gun for
awhile. This might be a problem.

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Crito
Hmm, now I'm imagining something like _Reason_
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash#Reason](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash#Reason)).
A backpack sized battery, but needs a water-submersed heatsink.

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api
I wonder what these kinds of huge gains in laser technology might mean for
fusion and beamed energy rocket propulsion?

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delucain
Not much for now, I don't think. They haven't improved on the intensity or
accuracy of lasers in general, just the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of
them. Large scale experimental projects like you mentioned don't generally
care about efficiency as much as intensity and accuracy. When fusion becomes
mainstream it might matter.

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Aardwolf
This seems a quite dangerous toy to me... a portable laser strong enough to
cut through metal.

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pjc50
Blu-ray lasers are already dangerous to humans and quite portable.

