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News at RP Photonics

At this place you learn about new activities of RP Photonics.

Other news, not listed here:

  • If you are interested in software, please have a look at the RP Photonics Software News, which you can receive as an e-mail newsletter or using an RSS feed.
  • We also regularly publish the Photonics Spotlight with interesting news and useful information in the area of photonics, particularly laser technology and applications.
  • There are also the RP Photonics Marketing News with updates on RP Photonics Marketing Solutions and general insight into digital photonics marketing.

2024-01-08: New RP Photonics Logo

After several years, we have somewhat revised our company logo:

RP Photonics logo

2023-11-15: Web Hosting Moved to Switzerland

In October, we have moved our web hosting from the German provider DomainFactory to the Swiss provider Cyon. A main motivation for this was to improve the handling of e-mails in terms of security. For our mails, we now use the security measures SPF, DKIM and DMARC. That makes it far harder for criminals to claim our domain and e-mail addresses as the sender domain, since the receiving mail servers are instructed by our DNS records to reject such mails. Further, the likelihood of our mails to be rejected is substantially reduced.

You can find more details at the bottom of our contact page.

2023-08-10: RP Fiber Power V8 ready for delivery

The new software version RP Fiber Power V8 is now ready for delivery! With the new Power Forms, you can set up even complex simulations in no time, without developing a script.

2023-05-15: New Website System

The RP Photonics website has been equipped with a new technical basis. The primary advantage is more convenient handling for us, but there are also some improvements for the users. For example, equations are now set much more nicely using MathJax.

2022-11-30: Dr. Gareth Moore joined RP Photonics

In October, Dr. Gareth Moore, a high-level physicist with extensive IT capabilities, jointed RP Photonics. He will focus on the software business, beginning with software development. Dr. Paschotta is very happy to form a strong team with him.

2022-01-27: RP Photonics is Moving Back to Switzerland!

On February 9, RP Photonics will move back to Switzerland. We are looking forward to live and work at an even nicer place.

2021-07-05: 1000 Articles in the RP Photonics Encyclopedia

The RP Photonics Encyclopedia now contains 1000 articles! See a Spotlight article for details.

2020-09-16: New Newsletter: the RP Photonics Marketing News

We have introduced another newsletter: the RP Photonics Marketing News. It presents the following types of information:

  • updates on RP Photonics Marketing solutions: for example, new features and discounts
  • general insight into digital photonics marketing

We do this in the form of a blog, which we try to make informative and useful.

2020-05-22: Numerical Power Package for the RP Fiber Power Software

Although most of the users of the RP Fiber Power software are perfectly happy with the computation speed, a substantially higher speed is desirable in some cases. For that, we are now offering the new Numerical Power Package, described on a new page on computation speed.

2020-02-18: Discount for Startups in the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide

We have introduced a special offer: there is now a startup discount of 25% for the advertising package in the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide.

2020-01-16: Further Improvement of Web Security

Important new security features have been introduced to the RP Photonics website in order to further improve web security. In particular, a strict Content Security Policy (CSP) has been implemented. The most important effect of that is to establish an effective second line of defense against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Therefore, our users are not exposed to any significant risks of that type, even if we still had any undetected XSS bugs. For example, scripts could no longer be loaded from other servers than our own one, and somehow injected scripts could no longer be executed. That holds for all web browsers except for extremely outdated ones.

Security ratings for websites are provided by various services such as the Mozilla Observatory. Here, we now get the security score A^+, while most of our competitors are much worse, often even on the worst possible level F.

2019-08-19: New RP Photonics Logo

After 15 years, we have now introduced a new company logo:

RP Photonics logo

We hope that you like it!

2019-06-25: 15th Anniversary of RP Photonics

We celebrate the 15th anniversary of RP Photonics. Find more details on our anniversary page.

2019-03-24: Renaming of the Encyclopedia

We have decided to rename the Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology into “RP Photonics Encyclopedia”. The reasons:

  • The former title, focusing entirely on lasers, increasingly got too narrow. Particularly this year, the encyclopedia is extended more and more (now having already 705 articles), covering much of the area of photonics.
  • Also, the new title is more consistent with that of the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide, with which the encyclopedia is intimately connected.
  • Finally, it is nice to have a shorter and more concise title.

2018-10-25: RP Photonics Became a Photonics Marketing Company

During the last years, RP Photonics one more expanded its activities in the area of photonics and laser marketing. In 2012, we introduced the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide, and meanwhile this has been adopted by many advertisers as a highly useful marketing tool.

Recently, we have done a further substantial revision of the buyer's guide offers, with which we further increased the value of the advertising while making the system even substantially simpler to use. We expect that this will give our photonics marketing activities a further boost. We have also heard from some of our advertisers that they are getting a lot of valuable traffic from our site – in fact much more than from any other website.

We have also substantially improved our descriptions of our advertising offers, which comprise

If you are a supplier, we warmly recommend that you have a look in order to check out the exciting opportunities for your business!

2018-10-13: Improvement of Website Design

We have completely revised the design of our website. Our primary goals were to make it more modern and even easier to use. To that end, we have changed many details, including the main navigation in the header, the other navigation items and of course also the content region. You may notice the different font used, the larger font size, and the now automatically scaling figures. The design also became much more responsive in the sense that it can be used on screens with quite different sizes.

2018-10-08: Revised Advertising Offers in the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide

We have introduced substantial revisions of our advertising offers in the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide. Essentially, our new ad package has become much more powerful for branding and lead generation, and only for special promotions you need to pay extra. So our advertisers get strongly improved results with the system, which also became substantially simpler for them to handle.

Read the revised details of the buyer's guide entries and of our revision.

2017-08-09: New Software Versions

debugger

Four of our software products (all which support scripting) have recently come out in new versions:

They offer substantially improved script editors and powerful new tools supporting script development:

  • The new script editors support useful features like a line number display, syntax highlighting and multi-level undo/redo functionality.
  • There is a handy syntax checker: find syntactical errors before executing a possibly time-consuming script.
  • You can also automatically reformat code in order to get a consistent formatting.
  • There is now a powerful debugger for scripts, which makes it much easier to locate and fix errors in sophisticated scripts. With that, you can execute your scripts command by command. Debugging is even possible within mathematical expressions! So it became much easier to find and fix errors in your scripts.

More and more, our software also becomes a nice replacement for MATLAB in many cases. While it is not specialized on matrix operations, where MATLAB offers a lot, it is very powerful for many numerical operations. Certainly, it is not necessary to have a MATLAB interface for obtaining flexible scripting capabilities – these are already built in!

Users of older versions have obtained fair upgrade offers: an upgrade costs little more than the difference in license prices.

Note that we have also published new brochures on the products RP Resonator, RP Coating and RP ProPulse.

2016-12-21: Short Courses at Photonics West 2017

Dr. Paschotta is offering two short courses at Photonics West 2017 in San Francisco:

2016-05-04: Promotion of White Papers and Videos

We have introduced another option for advertisers: the promotion of white papers and videos. A graphical preview of such a thing can be placed in a well visible box within a specific encyclopedia article. This means that your white paper or video will be seen exactly by those readers who are interested in a specific topic. Obviously, this is much better than e.g. just putting it on some general pages or into some white paper archive.

2015-12-10: Changes in the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide

We are permanently working on improvements of our RP Photonics Buyer's Guide – both for the users and the suppliers. Recently, we have introduced the new “ad packages”, with which suppliers can enhance the visibility of their entries in a simple manner. The new rules are nicely explained online and in a PDF document.

2015-11-11: New Version of the Software RP Resonator: V3

A couple of months ago, we have introduced the new custom forms in our software RP Fiber Power. These can be made for specific simulation tasks – either by the user himself or within the technical support. This feature is now also available in RP Resonator.

Particularly for the daily tasks, this extension is very useful. For example, you can now very simply calculate the focusing of a laser beam by simply entering the required inputs (the original beam parameters, the focal lengths of one or two lenses and their positions) into the form. The outputs are displayed in the same form and in some graphical diagrams.

form for focusing of a laser beam

2015-08-25: ASSL in Berlin

RP Photonics will attend the conference ASSL (Advanced Solid-State Lasers) in Berlin in October 2015. The exhibition, where RP Photonics has the booth 123, is open from October 5 to 8.

There will be an opportunity to see our software running on a notebook, so that one can have a direct impression and ask questions.

2015-08-16: Encrypted Data Transmission for the RP Photonics Website

The RP Photonics website is now using encrypted data transmission, using the HTTPS protocol (instead of HTTP) for all pages. For example, the encyclopedia main page will now be accessed via https://www.rp-photonics.com/encyclopedia.html. There is an automatic redirection for http requests to https. In your browser, you see a small lock icon in front of the page address.

There is a general move towards HTTPS, even where the transmitted data are not particularly sensitive (as it would be for online banking, for example). Wikipedia has done that in June 2015, we do it now, and many others will follow. The change improves security and privacy in various respects, and therefore fits well to our privacy policy. For example, if you surf on our encyclopedia, using your notebook in a hotel with a non-encrypted WLAN connection (and without a VPN tunnel), other parties in that hotel cannot watch any longer which pages you are visiting and what feedback you are submitting. Also, it is prevented that someone can manipulate the page content on the way to you.

The only disadvantage of that change is that the data transmission becomes somewhat slower. However, we think that this effect is quite acceptable. You will still enjoy the high speed of our very fast web server.

2015-08-15: RP Photonics on Facebook

RP Photonics has now got a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/RP.Photonics We will probably not be very active there, but occasionally post messages on new articles, for example.

2015-07-25: Faster Web Server

The RP Photonics website, which is probably the most popular website in the area of laser technology, is now hosted on a substantially more powerful server. The previous server was already reasonably fast, but users can now enjoy an outstanding performance.

2015-04-09: The New RP Fiber Power V6

There is a new version V6 of the RP Fiber Power software. This time, the user interface has been substantially improved: you can now use custom forms which are tailored to specific simulation tasks and can be defined either by the user or provided within the technical support.

With this improvement, the software can now be better used by many who need to carry out certain calculations without digging too deep into technical details.

2015-01-10: New Tutorial on Modeling of Fiber Amplifiers and Lasers

When working on the development of fiber amplifiers or lasers – either in industry or within scientific research projects – it can be extremely useful to have a quantitative understanding of the processes in these devices. That is one of the important benefits of computer modeling.

However, many people may be hesitating to get into this field, feeling that it is difficult to get started. Mainly in order to help in this situation, we have published another free online tutorial with the title "Modeling of Fiber Amplifiers and Lasers". In contrast to an earlier tutorial titled "Fiber Amplifiers", it focuses on concepts and methods of modeling rather than on the underlying physics. Various issues related to simulation software are also addressed.

2014-11-14: Short Courses of Dr. Paschotta in San Francisco

From February 7 to 12, 2015, there will be the Photonics West conference in San Francisco. As usual, Dr. Paschotta will present some short courses:

  • On Sunday (Feb. 8) from 13:30 to 17:30, there will be the half-day short course “Laser Beam Quality” (SC818).
  • On Monday (Feb. 9) from 08:30 to 17:30, the full-day short course “Applied Nonlinear Frequency Conversion” (SC931) will take place.

Make sure to register for the courses in time via the SPIE website.

If you like to meet Dr. Paschotta in San Francisco, just contact RP Photonics.

2014-03-17: Free Fiber Optics Software

In the context of our 10-year anniversary, RP Photonics has started to offer the new fiber optics software RP Fiber Calculator for free – even for commercial use! Users don't even have to register with us; if they like, they can stay completely anonymous. So we don't trade software for addresses.

After our extremely popular Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology, our free fiber optics tutorials and many other useful resources on our websites, this is another gift from RP Photonics to the worldwide photonics community. Our economical principle is: Be useful for many, and you are fine!

2014-01-31: 10th Anniversary of RP Photonics is Coming

In the beginning of June 2014, we will celebrate the 10th anniversary of RP Photonics. The company was originally founded in Zürich, Switzerland, in 2004, and moved to Bad Dürrheim, Germany, in 2010.

We mention that already because some journalists and others may want to prepare articles on our company, which we think is a quite special and remarkable one. Presumably, most people working in photonics worldwide know RP Photonics at least from our website, hosting the famous Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology and also the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide.

2013-12-17: Short Courses of Dr. Paschotta in San Francisco

From February 2 to 7, 2014, there will be the Photonics West conference in San Francisco. As usual, Dr. Paschotta will be very active there:

Make sure to register for the courses in time via the SPIE website.

If you like to meet Dr. Paschotta in San Francisco, just contact RP Photonics.

2013-10-07: Tutorial on Fiber Amplifiers

We have now also published a tutorial on fiber amplifiers. So far it has 7 parts, and more parts, covering aspects like the amplification of ultrashort pulses and amplifier noise, will follow soon. We expect that nearly everyone dealing with fiber amplifiers can learn something useful from it.

2013-10-01: Tutorial on Passive Fiber Optics

On our website, we have published a comprehensive tutorial on passive fiber optics. It has 11 parts, covering topics like fiber modes, polarization issues, chromatic dispersion and nonlinearities, and even the propagation of ultrashort pulses and signals in fibers. Both for beginners and for people already having some experience in fiber optics, this tutorial should be extremely useful.

2013-07-23: Webcast on Ultrafast Lasers and Optics

Dr. Paschotta presented a webcast on “Ultrafast Lasers and Optics”.

2013-06-13: Two New Newsletters

Since 2006, RP Photonics has published the Photonics Spotlight, a blog on laser physics and technology. We have now decided to also offer this in the form of a newsletter. The advantage is that if you subscribe to the newsletter, you are regularly seeing it, while otherwise you may forget to come back to that page and read our articles.

At the same time, we also introduce the RP Photonics Software News, a new blog which focuses on simulation & design software in photonics. This is particularly useful for people already using our software, as they are then regularly informed about upgrades and updates, new features, tips for efficient use, etc. People who have not yet got a license, but are interested in it, may also find it interesting to read this.

In order to get the newsletters, simply go to our page on newletters.