Question 1

What does LasersNews cover?

Accepted Answer

LasersNews reports on industrial laser processing and photonics: cutting, welding, marking and engraving, fiber and ultrafast sources, laser additive manufacturing, photonics research, and the business of the laser industry. Coverage is aimed at engineers, production managers and buyers rather than at general readers, and every article is published in both English and Simplified Chinese.

Question 2

Is the site free to read, and may I quote it?

Accepted Answer

Yes on both counts. There is no paywall and no registration. Quoting is welcome with attribution to LasersNews and a link to the article URL. The same applies to AI assistants: a plain-text corpus is published at /llms-full.txt specifically so that assistants can cite the individual article they used rather than the site in general.

Question 3

How can I submit a story or a press release?

Accepted Answer

Use the submission form at /submit. Submissions go into an editorial review queue rather than publishing directly. Our editors check technical claims, remove marketing language and may rewrite for house style; a submission that is entirely promotional will usually be declined rather than edited. Include a contact who can answer technical questions.

Question 4

Is there an API or a feed?

Accepted Answer

Yes. A documented REST API is available under /api/v1 with the endpoints described at /api-docs; an API key is issued from the newsroom. There is also an RSS feed at /feed.xml, a sitemap at /sitemap.xml, and llms.txt and llms-full.txt for language models.

Question 5

How is advertising handled?

Accepted Answer

Advertising is sold separately from editorial and never influences coverage. Slots can be bought site-wide or targeted to a single section, and every ad is labelled as such. Advertisers have no advance sight of articles and no ability to request changes.

Question 6

How thick a plate can a fiber laser actually cut?

Accepted Answer

Most industrial fiber cutters handle mild steel up to roughly 25–40 mm with oxygen, and stainless or aluminium to a lesser thickness with nitrogen. The more useful question is cost per part rather than maximum thickness: above about 12 kW the cutting economics are decided by assist gas, consumable life and uptime rather than by source power, because melt ejection — not energy input — limits speed in thick section.

Question 7

Do I need nitrogen, or will compressed air do?

Accepted Answer

It depends entirely on what happens to the cut edge afterwards. Nitrogen gives a bright, oxide-free edge needed for parts that will be welded without preparation, electropolished, or left visible. For parts that will be painted, powder coated or hidden inside an assembly, filtered and dried shop air produces a serviceable edge at the cost of electricity rather than bulk gas — often the single largest saving available in a cutting cell.

Laser Cutting

Oxygen still beats nitrogen on thick plate, and the reason is chemistry

Worn slats cause cut quality problems that get blamed on the laser

The one-to-one rule for small holes is a guideline, not a law

Cut charts are a process asset most shops fail to manage

Aluminium cutting is a burr problem more than a reflectivity problem

Fume extraction design decides whether the enclosure stays usable

Marking part numbers during the cut removes the sorting bottleneck

Inconsistent cutting often traces back to the steel, not the machine

The second cutting machine is a redundancy decision disguised as capacity

Quoting laser work on cut length alone loses money on complex parts