The fiber laser, with its humble beginning in the late 1980s, has undergone tremendous development in the past decade or so, transforming itself from a research curiosity to a major force in modern manufacturing. Today, it is revolutionizing our economy by fundamentally changing the way we mark, machine, and process materials on an industrial scale. The recent development of high-power fiber lasers is also fundamentally shaping a wide range of other areas from physical sciences and medicine to geology and space exploration. In the past few years, the tactical deployment of direct energy...