New Insights Into How Lasers Cut Flesh

From cosmetic to brain surgery, intense beams of coherent light are gradually replacing the steel scalpel for many procedures.

Despite this increasing popularity, there is still a lot that scientists do not know about the ways in which laser light interacts with living tissue. Now, some of these basic questions have been answered in the first investigation of how ultraviolet lasers – similar to those used in LASIK eye surgery – cut living tissues. It was published online in Physical Review Letters on October 10.

The effect that powerful lasers have on actual flesh varies both with the...

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