In order to develop the smallest laser in the world, physicist Oleg Kuzmin had to set up ZAO Firn and turn into an entrepreneur

Irik Imamutdinov

Folks in Krasnodar got into lasers in earnest in 1970s. Back then, the Council of Ministries issued a decree establishing the Ametist Design Bureau. Its specialty was developing active laser components and non-linear optical crystals. A strong crystallographic school under Professor Viktor Pisarenko’s guidance already existed in the Physics and Engineering Department at Kubansky State University by that time. The Experimental Physics Division headed by Pisarenko was charged with creating crystalline substances with certain properties for use as laser materials. In the late 1970s, Oleg Kuzmin, a graduate from this division, began working in crystal growth laboratory and eventually became head to the lab.

With apologies from Professor Huber

In the early 1980s, Kuzmin was granted a two-year fellowship under the supervision of Alexander Prokhorov, a member of the Academy of Sciences and a Noble prize-winner, at the Institute of Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Here, Kuzmin was introduced to a project to develop a new laser crystal, lanthanum-scandium borate. The project was run by Vladimir Laptev, a researcher at the Institute of Physics.
According to Kuzmin, scientific interest in the material, at the time absolutely new, was due to its unique property. It could “absorb” a large number of atoms of an activating substance into its structure.  While growing, most existing crystals (about 300 crystals, mainly, aluminum and rare earth garnets, are currently used to manufacture solid-state lasers) absorb a very small part of this substance into its structure. In practice, this meant that very small, highly efficient active laser components could be made from borates.
But in the early 1980s, the scientists only conducted basic experiments on the new material. Back in Krasnodar, Kuzmin decided to deal with traditional laser crystals like aluminum and rare earth garnets. When perestroika started, the university became too limiting for Kuzmin. He set up the first cooperative in Krasnodar, the Delta Research and Production Center, later renamed Firn. By 1993, however, military orders had come to an end, and like many Russian developers who had been left without domestic demand, the company began to look for foreign markets for its garnets. Things went quite well in Europe, and Firn even gained a network of distributors. In 2000, solid diode lasers demonstrated a 130-percent growth (from $2 billion to about $5 billion), and in 2001, they added another 30 percent.
Firn could have easily occupied a place in this thriving industry but Kuzmin didn’t start promoting his crystals on the western market. Kuzmin thought that he would rather conquer the world with a new, unique material, lanthanum-scandium borate. He had nearly mastered the manufacturing technology for growing the crystal by that time. The last doubts were dispelled in 1993 at a regular laser biennial exhibition in Munich. Experts from the German Federal Research and Technology Ministry took notice of the Russian company. When they saw the samples of borate displayed at Firn’s stalls, they immediately gave the company a grant of $150 thousand for a two-year borate development program.
Thanks to this international investment, by 1998 Kuzmin had perfected the manufacturing technology to produce lanthanum-scandium borate of very high optical quality. The lanthanum-scandium borate became a champion among laser crystals by efficiency as well. When Professor Günter Huber of Hamburg University, the head of the Institute of Laser Physics, heard that Firn’s crystal used 71% of pump energy, he didn’t believe the results of his own experiments – in theory, the achievable limit is 74%. Wary of his colleagues’ criticism, he didn’t want to publish the value of the new crystal’s upper capacity limit and indicated only 68%, for which he apologized to Kuzmin later. But even the understated index produced a storm of comments among specialists in non-linear optics. As a result, this ballyhoo led to active demand from research centers for the new material. The development was noticed in Russia, as well. In 1998, the Krasnodar Territory Administration awarded the scientists a prize in science and engineering. Oleg Kuzmin was on the verge of euphoria, “I thought that everybody would rush to buy our crystals, since there was nothing better for a small diode-pumped laser available on the market.” But the developers soon learned the awful truth: the industrial laser market doesn’t work on the principle that the best technologies should be introduced to production.    

The world market trap

Laser manufactures need crystals, and it might seem that the best material would always be in demand. Nothing of the sort.
Crystal manufactures are at the beginning of the production chain: crystal to laser to laser-based equipment. In essence, they are hostages of the established standards. For manufacturers, it is simpler to refine laser specifications made on existing circuits than to develop new ones. It not only has to do with the notorious problem of technological inertia, as even when handling known materials and developing a new laser, R&D alone costs $2-3 million, excluding the required reconstruction of processing lines and retraining personnel. Most importantly, promotion of a new laser demands coordination with the manufacturers of final products, such as laser range-finders or laser diagnostic complexes. Besides, a laser manufacturer doesn’t deal with a single crystal supplier. It needs two or three suppliers, first of all, in order to secure itself against delivery failures. This market arrangement became a trap for Kuzmin’s company. They knew how to grow a really unique crystal well but were unable to sell it to any serious laser manufacturer, because it had no competitors. While venerable manufacturers of crystals weren’t thrilled about the costly development of scandium borate, because the demand for traditional garnets was growing by 20 percent a year, anyway.
Kuzmin is confident that if another serious company growing the new crystal had emerged on the market apart from Firn, laser manufacturers would have swiftly gotten hooked on the new material’s charms, since it allows for researchers to create micro-lasers, a laser with an active radiating element of hundreds of microns in size, very stable in operation and tens of times smaller than traditional crystal-based devices of similar power. As no one wanted to buy a license for growing borate from him, Kuzmin decided to make a micro-laser himself. Among other things, mastering a new level of technological processing should have increased the company’s profitability exponentially.
They decided to start with a green laser. Kuzmin and his colleagues all had experience working on lasers in this range. In the early 1980s, they had worked on solid diode-pumped lasers operating in green and blue spectrums, designed to trace submarines from space. The global market of 1990s also demanded stable green lasers. First of all, they were used in diagnostic and monitoring systems. The existing diode-pumped lasers made by well-known companies like Coherent cost at least $25 thousand. Kuzmin reckoned that his device would be at least five times cheaper and ten times smaller.
When Firn exhibited his first continuous green micro-laser at the Laser 2001 show in Munich, the success was stunning, since there was nothing of the kind in the world.
However, specialists’ admiration of technological perfection of Firn’s laser didn’t mean commercial success. Manufacturers of laser equipment were interested in a thousand units, and Kuzmin openly confessed that he wouldn’t cope with more than few dozens units a year. Potential buyers were sure that production of the laser with such high-quality parameters was duly certified, and they refused to believe that it had been assembled literally in someone’s lap.

Two million for a revolution

That same year, 2001, Oleg Kuzmin entered the Russian Innovation Competition sponsored by Expert, and in the spring of 2002, he won. Six months later, Firn was recognized the best company at the Russian Venture Fair. A fair amount of publicity helped Kuzmin find a domestic partner who promised Firn an interest-free loan for part of its shares. Even the first installment of a million dollars was transferred. Construction of the laser plant was in full swing; the first money had been spent, and some work had even been carried on Kuzmin’s word that it would be paid for from the second installment. But the partner refused to transfer the second installment due to personal financial difficulties. Nevertheless, Kuzmin didn’t lose hope: to make a revolution on the global market, he needed two million dollars to complete construction of the plant plus the million he would have to return to the frivolous partner. The most interesting thing is that fortune smiled him again. Representatives from one of the largest electronic multinationals wanted to give the required amount of money to the physicist from Krasnodar provided that he would develop a new borate-based micro-laser (not a green but a white laser) for them.  And Kuzmin knows just how to do it.

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