The first laser was developed in 1960, and many other lasers and laser systems were created rapidly thereafter. Dental researchers began investigating lasers potential too. For example, Stern and Sognnaes reported in 1965 that a ruby laser could vaporize enamel. In 1989, the first laser specifically designed for dental use became available. Nowadays there are dozens of indications for use with various dental laser devices, and the clinical applications continue to increase. In the last two decades, there has been an explosion of research studies in laser application. In hard tissue application, the laser is used for caries prevention, bleaching, restorative removal and curing, cavity preparation, dentinal hypersensitivity, growth modulation, and for diagnostic purposes, whereas soft tissue application includes wound healing, removal of hyperplastic tissue to the uncovering of impacted or partially erupted tooth, photodynamic therapy for malignancies, photostimulation of herpetic lesion.
Lasers are generically named for the material contained with the center of the device, called an optical cavity. One common for dentistry type of fiber lasers is a fiber laser with carbon dioxide as a gaseous active medium. The other devices are either solid rods of garnet crystal combined with other elements or solid-state semiconductor fiber lasers are called diodes, and the crystal fiber lasers are designed with acronyms such as Nd:YAG, and suchlike.
Each wavelength has a somewhat unique effect on dental structures, due to the specific absorption of that laser energy in the tissue. Lasers in dentistry can be categorized into three groups:
- Diode and Nd:YAG laser wavelengths target the pigments in soft tissue and pathogens as well as inflammatory and vascularized tissue;
- Carbon dioxide lasers interact with water molecules in soft tissue and vaporize the intracellular water of pathogens;
- Erbium lasers (Er, Cr:YSGG and Er:YAG) interact with the water of soft and hard tissue. Erbium-doped lasers have an excellent thermal relaxation and very little collateral thermal damage occurs in tissues when proper parameters are followed. Erbium lasers can be used anywhere a scalpel is employed including periodontal procedures, gingival contouring, biopsies, frenectomies, pre-prosthetic procedures, and the like.
There are two basic emission modes for dental lasers: continuous wave and pulsed. Continuous wave lasers emit the energy constantly for as long as the fiber laser is activated: carbon dioxide and diode lasers operate in this manner. Nd:YAG, Er:YAG and Er:YSGG devices operate as free-running pulsed lasers.
Optromix Inc., headquartered in Cambridge, MA, USA, is a manufacturer of laser technologies, optical fiber sensors, and optical monitoring systems. We develop and manufacture a broad variety of fiber lasers, СО₂ lasers, Ti:Sapphire lasers, dye lasers, and excimer lasers. We offer simple erbium laser and ytterbium laser products, as well as sophisticated laser systems with unique characteristics, based on the client’s inquiry. We manufacture lasers using our own technologies based on the advanced research work and patents of international R&D team. Laser processes are of high quality, high precision, easily-automated manufacturing solutions that provide repeatability and flexibility.
If you are interested in Optromix fiber lasers and fiber laser systems, please contact us at info@optromix.com
The titanium-doped sapphire laser is a tunable laser has excellent tunability and potential to create ultrashort pulses. Ti:Sapphire lasers also possess high laser cross sections which, in turn, minimizes its Q-switching instabilities. It emits near-infrared and red light in the range of 650-1100 nm. Pumping of Ti:Sapphire laser is carried out with another laser that has a wavelength of 514 to 532 nm, which includes Nd:YVO laser, frequency-doubled Nd:YAG laser, or argon-ion laser. It combines excellent the optical, physical, and thermal properties of sapphire, and, so, it is widely used in scientific research.
Single mode 
The first Egyptian scientist to ever win a Nobel Prize in a science-related field is named Ahmed Hassan Zewail. He is also known as the Father of Femtochemistry. Using ultrashort laser flashes, he invented a technique to observe and describe such chemical reactions at the time intervals so short, the various transition states of matter can be peered into. This level of observation opened up the entire field of femtochemistry because fiber lasers are amazingly effective tools in a vast number of fields. We use fiber lasers everywhere from medical operations (in eye surgery, for instance) to manufacturing plants in high-powered laser cutters. However, it must be emphasized, lasers get hot, but since lasers are so fast, the surface does not even have time to heat before the work is already done. It means, in other words, the target of the laser is vaporized before your reaction time tells you it is even begun. This is called “cold ablation”. One of the biggest challenges was converting this technique from a special advanced laboratory tool, into a machine that could be used on the manufacturing floor. This conversion was made by German scientist Jens König, Stefan Nolte, and Dirke Sutter, working for technology Bosch. For this, they were awarded the German Future Prize 2013. Cold ablation techniques are currently being used in more manufacturing plants across the world.
Mode-locked lasers are an extremely promising type of lasers. The usefulness of such a laser system, while perhaps not obvious at first, is immense. The history of mode-locked lasers began after the first demonstration of a continuous wave lasing in 1960: the creation of the first mode-locked laser occurred at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. The term “mode-locking” refers to the requirement of phase locking many different frequency modes of a laser cavity. This locking has the result of inducing a laser to produce a continuous train of extremely short pulses rather than a continuous wave of light. Mode-locked lasers generate accordingly short pulses of intense coherent light. Laser cavities can support many different frequencies or resonant modes. A train of picosecond or femtosecond pulses can be produced by actively or passively controlling the light in the cavity so that those different resonant modes interfere. The term mode-locking resulted from an interpretation in the frequency domain: in the mode-locked state, several even many axial resonator modes are oscillating with a locked relative phase.
The main applications of Ti:Sapphire lasers are in research laboratories, in particular in spectroscopy. The large tuning range makes these fiber lasers attractive for generating tunable sub-picosecond pulses at short wavelengths. Ti:Sapphire lasers are used in NASA (Lidar Atmospheric Sensing Experiment) for measuring water vapor and aerosols, and their effects on atmospheric processes. Also, Ti:Sapphire laser systems are used to study chemical reactions on ultrafast time scales. Recently, devices to control and measure the spectral phase and amplitude of the ultrafast pulses have been developed in order to find applications in the field of coherent control which has grown increasingly sophisticated in these latter days. In biology, Ti:Sapphire lasers are instrumental in multiphoton microscopy (MPM), which has developed into the leading noninvasive laboratory tool for studying underlying biological phenomena. this tool offers high-resolution three-dimensional imaging in thick tissues, special including in vivo specimens. 
Prices for fixed and tunable fiber lasers are not yet equivalent, however. Although some tunable types are priced like fixed-wavelength devices, they are tunable over only very narrow ranges, about 3-4 nm. Those fiber lasers that can be tuned across wide wavelength ranges remain at least two or three times as expensive as their fixed counterparts. Such high price on tunable fiber lasers is explained by specific features: the increased complexity of manufacturing them, the extra testing required, and the newness of the technology, which has yet to reach true volume demand. As demand for tunable lasers rises, their prices will come down. Laser manufacturers claim the price premium for a widely tunable laser will drop to about 15-20 percent above that of a fixed laser anyway. 
High power fiber lasers are much more progressive and promising than traditional lasers using solids or gases as the active medium in many aspects. In order to ensure the high beam quality of fiber lasers, it is necessary to select the appropriate core diameter and difference of relative refractive indices, which can reduce the number of transverse modes. The CO2 laser also provides the high beam quality. In addition to this, fiber lasers and fiber laser systems based on a thin optical fiber with a diameter of several hundred micrometers as an active medium can easily be cooled and therefore attains high power output while maintaining the laser beam quality. Also, high power fiber lasers have very low loss of pump and laser light because they are both confined and guided in the low-loss fiber core. The high quantum efficiency of ytterbium serving as the active element leads to 60-70% efficiency in energy conversion from pump light to laser light. In virtue of these factors, laser systems on the basis of the optical fiber achieve a high output power with a high energy conversion efficiency while maintaining a high beam quality. Owing to the very high energy conversion efficiency and a resonator consisting of fine fiber and small optical components, high power fiber lasers have a far smaller heat dissipation mechanism and power supply, and thus far smaller overall dimensions and weight than traditional high power lasers. Also, it should be noted, such lasers constructed by fusion-splicing optical fibers are not influenced by vibration, shock, or temperature changes, and therefore have stable output power and stable high beam quality. Besides the above-mentioned factors, high-power fiber lasers are practically maintenance-free due to the fact that the paths of the beam are not exposed to the atmosphere. 
The action of ultrafast pulsed lasers is based on such phenomena of ultrafast optics and ultrafast laser physics as like Kerr effect and saturable absorbers. The Kerr effect leads to self-phase modulation. It also allows for Kerr lens mode locking. Related nonlinearities such as Raman scattering and self-steepening occur when the nonlinearity has a finite response time. Saturable absorbers, in its turn, used for passive mode locking introduce optical losses which are reduced for high optical intensities.