How it works
At 10600nm the chromophore is water, and skin is mostly water. The beam is absorbed within the first tens of micrometres, vaporising tissue precisely where it lands. Fractional mode splits that energy into a grid of microscopic columns, leaving bridges of untouched skin between them; those bridges are why fractional wounds close in days rather than weeks.
The columns do two things at once. They clear damaged surface tissue, and their thermal zones trigger a wound-healing response that remodels collagen over the following months. That is the whole mechanism behind CO2 resurfacing: controlled micro-injury, then organised repair. Pulse width here runs from 0.067 to 0.67ms, short enough to ablate cleanly and keep bulk heating of surrounding tissue low.
