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Professor Byer played a major role in the success of three laser technology companies. Quanta-Ray commercialized a high-energy pulsed laser invented in the Byer lab which is still widely used in scientific research. Quanta-Ray was acquired by Spectra-Physics in 1981 and is now a part of Newport Corporation. Byer was a founder of Lightwave Electronics, a pioneering designer and manufacturer of diode-pumped solid-state lasers, which was acquired by JDS Uniphase in 2005 and is now a part of Lumentum. He played a similar role at Mobius Photonics, which produced pulsed fiber lasers, and was acquired by IPG Photonics in 2013.

Professor Byer led Stanford University's contributions to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, which made the first-ever detection of a disturbance in space-time caused by a pair of merging black holes on September 14, 2015.