The IOP Business Awards recognize the vital role physics and physicists play in our economy, creating jobs and growth by powering innovation to meet the challenges facing us today, ranging from climate change to better healthcare and food production.

“Coherent, and especially the team at our Center of Excellence for Ultrafast Laser Technology in Glasgow, is extremely proud to receive this prestigious award for innovation from the Institute of Physics,” said Dr Vincent D Mattera, Jr, chair and CEO. “Ultrafast lasers are the tools of the future for clinicians seeking new pathways in diagnostic medicine and for neuroscientists investigating the mechanisms and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.”

In 2013, Coherent received the IOP award for its Chameleon laser that brought advanced laser imaging into biology labs. The Axon laser represents ten years of technology evolution in lasers and dedication to supporting advances in biomedical research. The Axon series of laser sources are fixed-wavelength, compact, and cost-effective femtosecond laser oscillators that enable a wide range of applications not only in life sciences, but also in imaging, inspection, and nanoprocessing.

Since 2012, the IOP Business Awards have celebrated the achievements of more than seventy physics-powered businesses across a variety of sectors, recognizing the vital role that physics and physicists play in creating jobs and growth by powering innovation to meet the challenges of today.

In 2023, two more awards went to Focal Point Positioning for pioneering and commercializing the methods and techniques needed to enable synthetic aperture processing on low-cost consumer devices such as smartphones and smartwatches, and to Keit Industrial Analytics for the development and application of a novel Fourier transform spectroscopy and its application in the monitoring and control of production processes.