Shortly after the invention of the laser by  Theodore Maiman in 1960, it was quickly recognized that a laser could act as a point source to evaporate source material in a vacuum chamber for fabricating thin films. In 1965, Smith and Turner succeeded in depositing thin films using a ruby laser, after which Groh deposited thin films using a continuous-wave CO laser in 1968. Further work demonstrated that laser-induced evaporation is an effective way to deposit dielectric and semiconductor films. However, issues occurred with regard to stoichiometry and the uniformity of the deposited films, thus diminishing their quality compared to films deposited by other techniques. Experiments to investigate the deposition of thin films using a pulsed laser at high power densities laid the foundation for pulsed laser deposition, an extremely successful growth technique that is widely used today. 
Experiments utilizing continuous-wave lasers continued to be performed throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, highlighting the many advantages of continuous-wave laser evaporation including low power densities, which can reduce surface damage to sensitive films. It proved challenging to achieve congruent evaporation from compound sources using continuous-wave lasers, and film deposition was typically limited to sources with high vapor pressures due to the low continuous wave power densities available.
In 2019, the evaporation of sources using continuous-wave lasers was rediscovered at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research and dubbed "thermal laser epitaxy". This new technique uses elemental sources illuminated by high-power continuous-wave lasers (typically with peak powers around 1 kW at a wavelength of 1000 nm), thus allowing the deposition of low-vapor-pressure materials such as carbon and tungsten while avoiding issues with congruent evaporation from compound sources.