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Education and Training

Education usually occurs at school and in universities. However, is that sufficient in a fast evolving field like laser technology? Surely not – continuing education is vital for maintaining and developing the competence of your technical staff. This holds for your product engineers, technicians, scientists, developers – essentially for anyone involved in developing, manufacturing, testing and repairing laser products. Quite obviously, continuing education is essential in a high-tech area, as it affects the competence, creativity and productivity of your team, also the team spirit and motivation.

And you just found out where to obtain high-level professional advancement courses on laser technology and related areas! From RP Photonics you can get tailored in-house courses on topics like laser technology, fiber optics, nonlinear optics and others. This is also possible with video transmission – every engineer using his or her notebook, even at home, for participating in a course!

Tailored Training Courses for Your Technical Team

The success of a training course depends very much not only on the technical competence of the course instructor, but also on his willingness and ability to precisely match the attendees' needs. Dr. Paschotta is a very experienced teacher who carefully focuses on the actual purpose of such a training course and knows well what is essential for reaching the goals.

Already the planning will be done in a well structured manner:

• As a very important first step, Dr. Paschotta carefully discusses with you not only what topics should be treated in the course and with what level of detail, but also what goals should be achieved, what is the already available know-how among the participants, etc.
• Then he works out a detailed proposal for the course and further adapts it according to your feedback. This is then the basis for a concrete quotation.
• From that, you will have a concrete imagination of the planned course, and you can decide whether this would be worth the expense.

Benefits of Training Courses

Such a training course is a very productive and stimulating experience for a team of a high-tech company (e.g., a laser development team). It can serve several purposes:

• Boosting the competence: within a short time, the competence of the workforce in a particular area is boosted to a much higher level. This results in increased effectiveness of the team.
• Stimulating new ideas: the intense technical discussion in a course can trigger new ideas for better solutions or new products.
• Motivating the staff: a course on an interesting topic can be very motivating for your personnel. It can strengthen the spirit of a development team and generally stimulates the interest in further learning.
• Establishing a vital contact: a training course may be the best way to check in detail the competence of RP Photonics and to get a feeling for how useful a cooperation can be for your company.

The achieved cost savings can substantially exceed the expenditure for the course. Do you know a better way to obtain the mentioned benefits?

In-House Training, Video Transmission

A training course will typically span between one and three full course days and can be performed at your location. Dr. Paschotta presents most materials based on a carefully prepared PowerPoint presentation, but can at any time flexibly respond to questions from the participants.

It is also possible to perform courses with video transmission, eliminating the requirement of the instructor to travel to your location. That allow such courses to be performed at lower cost while saving a lot of CO₂ emissions. That approach gives also more flexibility concerning the timing – for example, you may have several half course days spread over a few weeks. Dr. Paschotta has delivered such courses e.g. in California from his office in Germany, and although the personal contact is then less direct, it worked to the full satisfaction of the customers.

Examples for Possible Topics of Training Courses

You may order some general laser training or fiber optics training, but note that you have the option to define much more precisely what is of interest for your team. Here are some examples for topics in the wider area of laser science and laser technology:

• introduction to lasers: principles of laser operation, properties of laser beams, important types of lasers
• solid-state gain media: basics, comparison of gain media, selection for concrete applications
• introduction to fiber optics: fibers as optical waveguides, single-mode vs. multi-mode fibers, launching light into fibers, polarization issues with fibers, fiber lasers and amplifiers, novel types of optical fibers
• fiber amplifiers and fiber lasers: physical principles, typical arrangements, important properties, modeling and optimization
• introduction to laser diodes: different types of laser diodes, basic properties, beam shaping
• beam quality of lasers: definition, measurements, origins, and consequences
• nonlinear frequency conversion for the generation of visible laser radiation
• noise processes in fiber amplifiers: physical origins, characterization, effects on applications
• nonlinearities in fibers: physical principles, modeling, specific applications, and undesired effects
• design of dispersive laser mirrors: operation principles, design limitations, design methods
• applications of frequency comb sources: precise measurements of frequency and time, characterization of laser noise
• laser noise: types of noise, origins, optimization by design and by feedback techniques, measurement techniques, modeling
• photodetectors: various types of photodetectors (e.g. photodiodes), required electronics, limits for the sensitivity

These examples are just meant to stimulate ideas. The concrete subjects, focus and level of detail can be agreed upon according to the customer's needs.

Guaranteed Competence

You personnel can only learn from a person with high-level scientific and technical skills, combined with strong didactic experience. All these requirements are ideally met by Dr. Rüdiger Paschotta, who

• is a distinguished expert in laser technology and related areas,
• has conducted very successful research for many years,
• has published over 100 papers in refereed scientific journals,
• is continually following the new scientific literature and attends several scientific conferences per year,
• is also further learning in consulting work,
• and has developed advanced skills to extract the essentials and to present them in a very clear way (as demonstrated in the RP Photonics Encyclopedia and in this online tutorials, for example.).

Use this opportunity to get vital know-how for your technical team!

Public Courses

Dr. Paschotta also regularly holds courses at scientific conferences.

Some recently done short courses are:

• Feb. 2, 2020: SC 931, Applied Nonlinear Frequency Conversion (full day) at Photonics West 2020 in San Francisco
• Feb. 4, 2020: SC 1180, Passive and Active Fiber Optics (full day) at Photonics West 2020 in San Francisco