Future trends and applications of ultrafast laser technology

In this talk we will present an overview of recent development of ultrafast lasers sources and their applications. This talk will highlight some recent state of the art ultrafast pulse results from Ti:Sapphire and Ytterbium based laser systems. There are significant advantages in being able to directly diode pump Ytterbium materials resulting in more compact bulk solid state and fiber based laser systems. Several newly emerging technologies such as Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplification, and Supercontinuum Generation have generated great excitement in recent years. The evolution of more compact and user friendly ultrafast laser systems has enabled completely new fields that take advantage of the extremely high peak powers and very short time duration of ultrafast laser pulses. Recent results in the fields of multiphoton microscopy, micromachining, 3-D fabrication, and spectroscopy will be discussed.