The BeamPath™ Technology

Delivering the World’s Most Precise Laser Scalpel

OmniGuide’s BeamPath™ fibers are the world’s first and only flexible fibers capable of delivering CO₂ laser energy.

Among surgical cutting tools, CO₂ lasers offer precision and control over penetration depth into tissue. However, the long wavelength of CO₂ laser energy (10.6 microns), absorbed by all known materials, historically prevented the development of a flexible fiber delivery system. This limited CO₂ lasers strictly to “line-of-sight” surgical procedures. OmniGuide has solved the problem of flexibly guiding CO₂ laser light by utilizing an innovative photonic band gap mirror lining, which guides light through a hollow core.

Conventional optical fibers guide laser light through a solid core via a process known as index guiding or total internal reflection. This mechanism of transmission is dependent on the transparency of the material through which light propagates, and thus carries with it all limitations of the constituent material. The most acute limitation is that of transmission across different wavelengths. For instance, silica’s transmission window ranges from 300 to 2000nm, and it is thus opaque to both ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths.

OmniGuide’s BeamPath™ photonic bandgap fibers are the world’s first solid state structure-based transmitters. Within each fiber, over forty microscopic layers of alternating glass and polymer form a reflective system known as a Bragg diffraction grating. The wavelength of light transmitted by this structure is a function of the thickness of the glass/ polymer bi-layers, which can be easily varied. Thus the BeamPath™ fibers can be scaled to channel different wavelengths of light. This approach represents a new paradigm in the field of light transmission, and resolves all of the limitations inherent in conventional fiber optics.

OmniGuide has also mastered a manufacturing process through which semiconductor/ polymer multi-layers can be manufactured in a scalable manner, to tolerances that were previously seen only in the semiconductor industry. The manufacturing breakthrough that made this possible is a system of drawing out a foot-long “preform” with millimeter-thick layers, into hundreds of meters of fiber with micron-thick layers.

The concept behind the omnidirectional mirror was published in Science in 1998, and results from the first laboratory prototypes were published in Nature in 2002. The technology was licensed exclusively to OmniGuide by MIT for development in 2003.