A Laser That Can Vapourise Matter Without Heat

In a quiet industrial park in Petaluma, a startup called Raydiance is miniaturising a type of laser that generates an ultrashort burst of photons so intense that it can vapourise matter without creating heat. CEO Barry Schuler, who founded Raydiance based on technology that arose from military research, says it could be used for any number of purposes, such as removing tattoos without burning the skin or killing cancer cells without affecting healthy ones. Now, Schuler is ready to proclaim that the Raydiance laser — which looks like an ordinary slide projector — could spawn an industry based on using brief bursts of photons to poke clean holes, with no burn marks, in anything from skin to steel