From March 18 to 20, 2026, the 21st Munich Shanghai Laser & Photonics Expo concluded successfully at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre. Under the theme “New Light, New Momentum,” the event spanned over 100,000 square meters of exhibition space, attracting nearly 1,500 exhibitors from around the world and over 58,000 professional visitors. As the annual barometer of Asia’s laser, optics, and photonics industry, the expo showcased the latest breakthroughs in laser intelligence, high power, and precision manufacturing, clearly outlining the industry’s trajectory toward “Optics-AI Integration.”

Laser Sources: Advancing on Both High-Power and Narrow-Linewidth Fronts

In laser source technology, the expo revealed a dual-track development path: ultra-high power and precision narrow linewidth.

High-power laser technology has seen continuous output powers from fiber lasers commonly exceed tens of kilowatts, with some industrial products entering the 100-kilowatt era. Key breakthroughs include suppression of nonlinear effects, control of transverse mode instabilities, and preservation of beam quality at high powers. New pump structures and specialty fiber designs enable thicker section cutting, faster welding speeds, and reduced heat-affected zones in macro-processing applications.

Narrow-linewidth and single-frequency laser technology emerged as another technical hotspot. For high-end applications such as semiconductor inspection, quantum sensing, and precision spectroscopy, single-frequency lasers now achieve watt-level or higher output powers with linewidths compressed to the kilohertz range. Notably, continuous-wave and pulsed deep-ultraviolet lasers (below 266 nm) have made significant progress, solving thermal management and crystal damage issues in nonlinear frequency conversion, providing critical light sources for lithography inspection, Raman spectroscopy, and maskless lithography.

Ultrafast lasers continue to evolve toward higher average powers and higher repetition rates. Femtosecond lasers now operate at hundred-watt average powers with pulse durations below 100 femtoseconds, while repetition rates have jumped from the kilohertz to the megahertz range. These advanced ultrafast sources demonstrate exceptional performance in cutting brittle materials, drilling flexible electronics, and bioimaging, achieving crack-free, heat-affected-zone-free precision processing of materials such as glass, sapphire, and ceramics.

Nonlinear Optics and Frequency Conversion: From Lab to Engineered Products

Laser frequency conversion was a core highlight of the expo. Second-harmonic generation, third-harmonic generation, sum-frequency generation, difference-frequency generation, and optical parametric amplification have moved from laboratory demonstrations to industrial products.

Deep-ultraviolet sources based on cascaded frequency doubling or four-wave mixing now offer engineered stability at wavelengths such as 193 nm, 213 nm, and 266 nm. These all-solid-state lasers are gradually replacing traditional excimer lamps and xenon lamps in semiconductor wafer inspection, mask repair, and master disc mastering, offering higher resolution, lower operating costs, and longer lifetimes.

Mid-infrared lasers represent another major direction. Tunable mid-infrared sources based on optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) and difference-frequency generation (DFG) cover the two atmospheric windows of 3–5 μm and 8–12 μm, achieving millijoule-level pulse energies and kilohertz repetition rates. These sources show broad application prospects in gas sensing, plastic sorting, medical diagnostics, and infrared countermeasures. Integrated, air-cooled, plug-and-play mid-infrared laser modules significantly lower the barrier to application.

Quasi-phase matching (QPM) technology continues to mature. Frequency conversion devices based on periodically poled crystals (e.g., PPLN, PPKTP) show ongoing improvements in conversion efficiency, temperature bandwidth, and design flexibility. They can be engineered for any desired wavelength for doubling, summing, differencing, or OPO, and they utilize the largest nonlinear coefficient of the crystal, achieving high efficiency even under moderate pump powers.

Optical Components and Coatings: The Enabling Foundation for High-Power and DUV

Progress in optical components underpins laser technology advances. High-damage-threshold coatings and deep-ultraviolet optics were notable highlights.

For high-power lasers, damage thresholds for antireflection, high-reflection, and partial-reflection coatings now commonly exceed 30 J/cm² (for nanosecond pulses) or withstand hundreds of watts of continuous-wave power. Advanced deposition processes such as ion-beam sputtering and atomic layer deposition produce denser, lower-absorption, and better-adhering coatings. Thermal management designs — including heat-sink structures and diamond-based heat-spreading layers — are integrated into optical components to effectively suppress thermal lensing.

The deep-ultraviolet band (below 200 nm) imposes extreme demands on optical materials. Precision-finished calcium fluoride (CaF₂) and fused silica optics achieve sub-nanometer surface roughness and transmittance exceeding 99.5% at 193 nm. Deep-UV mirrors and beamsplitters based on multilayer dielectric coatings now offer higher reflectivity and broader bandwidth, clearing obstacles to practical deep-UV laser systems.

Metasurface optics also emerged as an emerging technology. Metasurface lenses, vortex-beam generators, and polarization-control devices based on dielectric nanostructures achieve the functionality of conventional macroscopic optics at subwavelength thicknesses. Though still in research and early application stages, they show great potential in AR/VR displays, miniature spectrometers, and light-field manipulation.

Laser + AI: A Systemic Deep Integration

The most prominent technical trend at the expo was the systemic integration of artificial intelligence with laser technology, visible at three levels:

1. Intelligent beam control. Machine-learning-based wavefront shaping and phase-retrieval algorithms are used to compensate in real time for thermal lensing, atmospheric turbulence, and fiber mode instabilities. By combining high-speed spatial light modulators with AI control algorithms, beam quality, focal position, and spot shape can be dynamically optimized, significantly improving processing consistency and yield.

2. AI-enhanced processing path planning. In laser cutting, welding, and marking, AI algorithms automatically generate optimal scanning paths and energy modulation profiles based on workpiece geometry, material properties, and thermal accumulation. Compared to traditional rule-based methods, AI path planning reduces processing time by 20–40% while minimizing spatter and thermal distortion.

3. In-line defect detection and closed-loop control. Combining coaxial imaging, interferometry, or optical coherence tomography with deep-learning models enables real-time identification of defects such as voids, cracks, and incomplete fusion during processing, with feedback adjustment of laser parameters (power, frequency, focal position). This technology has been validated in lithium-ion battery tab welding, semiconductor packaging, and additive manufacturing.

Ultrafast Precision Processing: From “Can Do” to “Does Well”

Ultrafast laser processing demonstrated a transition from proof-of-concept to scalable application. Brittle material processing remains the largest application area: cutting, drilling, and scribing of glass, sapphire, and ceramics leverage the non-thermal effects of femtosecond lasers to achieve “cold processing” without micro-cracks or melt re-solidification layers. Stealth dicing — focusing the beam inside the material to form a modified layer, then separating it with slight tension or bending — is particularly suitable for scribing LED substrates, MEMS devices, and biochips.

Flexible electronics processing is another growth area. Ultrafast laser patterning and drilling of polyimide, PET, and other flexible substrates avoid heat-accumulation-induced wrinkling or delamination. Roll-to-roll ultrafast laser processing systems demonstrated micrometer-precision electrode patterning and through-hole array fabrication on meter-wide flexible films.

Metal micro-machining using femtosecond lasers achieves high circularity, burr-free, and recast-layer-free processing of air-film cooling holes in aero-engine blades, fuel-injection micro-orifices, and medical stent cutting. Compared to conventional electrical discharge machining and long-pulse laser processing, the heat-affected zone in femtosecond processing is controlled to sub-micrometer levels, significantly improving component fatigue life.

Beam Shaping and Coherent Combining: Breaking Power and Brightness Barriers

Improving the brightness of high-power lasers faces fundamental physical limits. Coherent combining and spectral combining are among the breakthrough paths demonstrated.

Coherent combining phase-locks multiple laser units so that they coherently superpose in the far field, achieving near-diffraction-limited beam quality from a single aperture. Systems based on active phase control (e.g., stochastic parallel gradient descent algorithms) stably lock dozens of fiber amplifiers, achieving combined powers of tens of kilowatts with beam quality M² better than 1.5.

Spectral combining uses dispersive elements (gratings or volume Bragg gratings) to spatially overlap laser beams of different wavelengths, achieving power summation without sacrificing beam quality. This technique has less stringent phase-control requirements and lower engineering difficulty, making it widely adopted in industrial cutting and welding.

Beam shaping elements — diffractive optical elements, aspheric lenses, and freeform optics — have also progressed significantly. Arbitrary beam shapes (square, line, ring, multi-focal arrays) are achieved with precisely engineered shapers delivering energy uniformity better than 95%. Beam shaping is now standard in laser heat treatment, photovoltaic doping annealing, and 3D printing where specific intensity distributions are required.

Outlook: Optics-AI Integration Driving Next-Generation Laser Technology

The 2026 Munich Shanghai Laser & Photonics Expo clearly demonstrated three major directions for laser technology:

  • Higher: higher power, higher brightness, higher processing speed;
  • Finer: precision extending to sub-micrometer and even nanometer scales, with heat-affected zones approaching zero;
  • Smarter: AI deeply embedded in source control, processing paths, and in-line inspection, forming self-sensing, self-decision-making intelligent laser systems.

With continued breakthroughs in enabling technologies — nonlinear optics, ultrafast lasers, intelligent control, advanced coatings — lasers are evolving from mere “processing tools” into “core enabling technologies for smart manufacturing.” Driven by strategic fields such as new energy, semiconductors, biomedicine, and aerospace, the photonics industry is moving into a new era of greater precision, intelligence, and sustainability.

In March 2027, the Shanghai New International Expo Centre will once again witness the ongoing iteration of technology and the leap of industry.