I hear news about advances in fiber lasers for the industry and military applications... People saying that CO2 laser will get obsolete and don´t have more space for innovation on gas lasers.
What is your opinion about that?
Depends on the application. Multi-kW CW Yb fibre lasers with output up to 20 kW single mode and 100 kW multi-mode and Raman fibre lasers are commercially available for the near infra-red (NIR) and are presumably replacing CO2 lasers in machining
As A. C. Selden said, it really depends upon your application. CO2 and fiber lasers have very different wavelengths. In the additive manufacturing area, we use CO2 lasers for polymer work and fiber lasers for metals. The CO2 lasers we use have been essentially unchanged for a couple of decades, but they are reliable and work well. We would love to use fiber lasers, but most plastics are transparent to NIR radiation. We could add dyes or absorbers, but that adds unnecessary cost and complexity to the process. I am sure this difference plays out in other areas, as well. I don't think CO2 lasers are going away any time soon.
Areas of application of CO2 lasers that are still actual and will be actual in the future:
Selective laser sintering of polymer powders.
Cutting of non-metals, especially dieboars.
Oxygen assisted cutting of thick metals.
Applications related to laser plasma sustaining in moderate pressure molecular gases and most atomic gases (1 um radiation is effective only when plasma is to be sustained in heavy rare gases under very high pressure).
Laser assisted propulsion and energy transmission (due to atmospheric transparency band around 10 um).
LIDARs for civil and military applications.
Medicine and veterinary (thereapy and surgery with relatively low average power RF excited diffusively cooled lasers).
"Oxygen assisted cutting of thick metals. "
Unfortunately, not, this technology would be replaced soon with very high-power nitrogen fiber laser cutting. More over fiber lasers have unimaginable opportunities on in process beam shaping, small attitude scanning, intensity distribution variation and so on and so forth. Fiber lasers are much more fruitful for future technology development.
The fibre laser has numerous advantages as compared to CO2.
Its far more compact, reliable, no consumables, far better depth of field, cheaper optics, higher efficiency, etc etc.
But CO2 still gets used where its long wavelength is absorbed when the roughly ten times shorter wavelength of Yb or Nd lasers is not.
However CO2 beware, in modest power applications there are longer wavelength fibre lasers based on Er, Tm, Ho for example, intermediate in wavelength. These may further invade 'CO2 territory' over time, but possibly only at low/moderate powers.
CO2 has become a bit of a niche technology people use when they can't use fibre, which tends to be the first choice. Fibre has displaced bulk short wavelength lasers, Nd:YAG for example, to a very large extent.
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