Silent Industrial Leap for Relatively Unknown Optical Elements

Copyright: © 2017 Divliansky IB. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. In the past decade, one can say almost covertly, a specific type of optical elements has found their places in broad area of laser systems, devices and optical systems as a whole. These elements are called volume Bragg gratings or VBGs for short. They slowly claimed their ground and now are manufactured in thousands and incorporated from simple laser diode modules to complex femtosecond systems. The mergers of laser companies and in general the globalization of the lasers and optics markets in the past decade helped a lot for this silent, but also big leap in the number of VBGs used in commercial as well as research applications.