Dr. Tso Yee Fan (center) and Dr. Antonio Sanchez-Rubio (right), both from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and Bien Chann (TeraDiode), who is responsible for the commercialization of the award-winning development, receive the first prize of the Berthold Leibinger Innovationspreis 2012 and thus prize money of 30,000 euros. With their work, the scientists have overcome a shortcoming of diode lasers: in order to match the power of multi-kilowatt industrial lasers, the laser light of many diode lasers must be combined. With conventional methods, the beam quality deteriorates with the number of combined beams. In order to achieve a high brilliance of beam quality, Fan and Sanchez-Rubio use the principle of splitting white light into the spectral colors on a prism: up to a hundred or more diode lasers, each with a slightly different wavelength, beam their light side by side onto an inclined, very fine optical grating. The grating reflects different wavelengths at different angles and can therefore superimpose the different beams exactly on top of each other if they are arranged geometrically.