The idea — to take and cut a lens in a transparent cornea — is not new. At first it was done manually, with a scalpel directly on the surface (difficult and very rough, with a sea of side effects). The first laser was used in 1979, then it was a pulsed infrared emitter with an effective pulse length of 4 nanoseconds.


Step 1: creating a plasma bubble, in fact — a microburst. Step 2: expansion of the shock and heat waves. Step 3: cavitation bubble (plasma expansion). Step 4: the formation of a parallel slice at the expense of several adjacent laser focus points.