World’s first battery-operated portable wideband laser
SuperLight Photonics has developed a battery operated portable wideband laser that it says is the first in the industry.
The SLP-1000 has a high-quality smooth wide spectral output for industrial and medical imaging applications and spectroscopy.
SuperLight Photonics, based in Enschede, the Netherlands, is a spin-off company from the University of Twente aiming to become a leading player in wideband lasers.
Supercontinuum lasers, also known as wideband lasers, provide a wide bandwidth while maintaining high coherence and low noise. However, today’s industrial lasers are large and heavy, with limited environmental robustness, and require high power. While they deliver a wide bandwidth of colours, one colour is usually dominant with the remaining colours are at low relative power levels.
The SLP-1000 weighs 900 grams (32 oz) and has a volume of less than 1 litre. It uses SuperLight’s Patterned Alternating Dispersion (PAD), offers a high-quality, coherent and stable spectral output of 400nm@-3dB, 1500nm@-20dB in the Near Infrared (NIR) band at a repetition rate of 100MHz with pulse durations around 20fs pulses.
The unit is based on a seed laser from Menlo Systems and the output is equipped with a Thorlabs-compatible screw thread (SM05) to integrate with other products from Thorlabs, a global designer and manufacturer of photonics laser equipment.
The short pulse duration of around 20fs comes from having highly efficient supercontinuum generators. In comparison to alternative products, lower pulse energies can be used at the input of these devices; thus pulse broadening needed for amplification, noise from amplifier stages, and additional optical components can be eliminated. The SLP-1000 then provides high-quality nonlinear pulse compression for application fields such as third harmonic surface imaging and transient absorption spectroscopy.
“The SLP-1000 is the result of the journey from a spark of an idea, kindled during my tenure at Twente University, to an industrial product reality. The industry demand for a portable, high-quality wideband laser has spanned more than a decade,” said Haider Zia, founder and CTO of SuperLight Photonics.
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