The CLEO: 2014 co-sponsors (APS, IEEE Photonics Society, OSA) and Laser Focus World announced Daylight Solutions, San Diego, Calif., as the winner of this year’s CLEO/Laser Focus World Innovation Award. The award recognizes the company “for the development of Spero, the first laser-based infrared microscope that delivers high-resolution (< 5 µm) images over a wide field of view in a compact, broadly tunable, turnkey instrument with rapid ‘live mode' imaging at 30 fps."

Using an ultrafast laser system, a group in Physical and Life Sciences at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, Calif., subjected iron to extremely rapid dynamic compression and showed that the transition from one crystal structure to another can take place in less than 100 trillionths of a second after the compression begins.