14 DAY TRIAL // Powerful lasers have been around for some time, and some monster installations can reach an output of 2 petawatts of power, few can be efficiently employed as reliable industrial installations.
Usually, the usefulness of an industrial laser is not to blow up things like the Osaka monster, but how well, and fast, it cuts steel. Once the CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition) fabrication methods are advanced enough to provide larger and purer synthetic diamonds, more powerful lasers end up being developed as a result.
The Fraunhofer Institute from Germany and MQ Photonics Research Centre in Australia managed to build a laser twenty times more powerful than any industrial laser to date. The ability to cut through steel with about 380 Watts @ 1240nm is quite enough to do a pretty good job at cutting steel without any sort of difficulty.
Kilowatt power isn't everything
Present-day lasers can easily bring the kilowatt range behind them and claim incredible cutting power, but because of their narrow wavelength coverage and their not handling extreme thermal loads well given the immense power behind them, pulse cutting through can take a really long time..
Nonetheless, the new diamond-based lasers do an excellent job at handling heat by transferring it quickly from the hot zone down the beam much faster than previous available lasers. To do this, the new laser uses the Raman conversion, a method of converting light in wavelengths long enough to be absorbed by metal and have the photons deposit enough energy to cut through steel instead of passing through or bounce off.
In addition, the output wavelength of lasers that pass through the silicon diamond also depends on the latter's transparency, that being another reason why CVD manufacturing quality is so important.
Industrial cutting lasers can become a much more common thing in the future since the CVD prices will drop and the synthetic silicon diamonds will become purer and of higher quality.