To mark its 100th anniversary, the technology company in Ditzingen, west of Stuttgart, Germany, put on a very special light show. Last week, a three-kilowatt green laser shone a good ten kilometers into the sky. There is no more powerful laser with a green wavelength in the world. Such lasers are otherwise used in industry for welding copper to produce weld seams of consistently good quality.

The green wavelength laser is based on disk laser technology and belongs to the group of solid-state lasers. To generate the green wavelength, there is a special crystal in the laser resonator. This converts the infrared laser radiation into the green wavelength. For the light show, engineers from the company worked with the show laser manufacturer Lightline to convert the industrial high-power laser into an event laser. However, Trumpf manufactures much more powerful lasers, but they do not emit green light. The company’s most powerful laser for industrial use has an output of 24 kilowatts. Trumpf has even built a sixty-kilowatt laboratory laser for the Federal Institute for Materials Research (BAM).

“Trumpf is one hundred years old this year. Thanks go to the employees for their tireless commitment to the company over the years,” said CEO Nicola Leibinger-Kammüller. From a mechanical workshop in Stuttgart West, Trumpf has developed over the past decades into a leading manufacturer of machine tools and laser technology. Today, for example, the company’s name is synonymous with EUV lithography for manufacturing the most powerful microchips, laser applications for electromobility and 3D-printed components for space technology.

With around 17,000 employees – almost 6,000 of them at the headquarters in Ditzingen and Gerlingen – the company generated sales of around 4.2 billion euros in the past fiscal year. With more than seventy subsidiaries, the company is now represented in all major markets worldwide. In addition, Trumpf trains many young people: in 2022 alone, around one hundred apprentices and dual students started their training in Ditzingen.

Further reading: 100 years of technology pioneers – how Trumpf came to the laser, PhotonicsViews 20(4), April 2023, pp. 44–47