I just got home from the JMAR meeting a short time ago, and it will take a couple of days to write a report. We spent 7 HOURS with JMAR, including the morning's formal presentation, the luncheon and the afternoon tour. Just to hit a few highlights, I'll make some random comments for now.
WHAT I WAS MOST IMPRESSED WITH:
1. The JMAR laser (pictured on the front of the annual report) creates a heat that is equal to the center of the Sun - 5 million degrees. (This laser creates x-rays.) Imagine how fast you could toast marshmallows!!<g> By the way, we all had to don smoked eye goggles to see a demo of this laser in action.
2. The technology we saw today is extremely complex and the JMAR people have created something that has never been done before. Yes - it's taking a long time to get it commercialized, but they ARE making progress. I'll say more about this later.
3. There's a lot of "brainpower" at JMAR. I don't know the ratio of PhD's to total employees, but it must be pretty high. We heard presentations by nine of the JMAR scientists and laser experts. We saw how they're scaling up the power on the Pico-second x-ray source (PXS). What started out as a rather large table-top device, with stacks of electronics under the table, has now been shrunk to a much, much smaller and compact system. They are working to scale the power up to 24 watts with multi-beam, hi-power x-rays, using a collimator. JMAR's x-rays are very "efficient" and produce little debris.
4. Because JMAR is doing things no other company has done, there are many markets that would be expanded by their x-ray sources. In order to enter the semiconductor market, however, it is critical they get to 30 W power in order to get acceptable throughput.
I'll add more later. Have to "digest" my notes. It was an interesting day.
Betty
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