Photonics West: Tuesday

26 Jan 2005

A selection of some of the new products on display at this year’s exhibition.

•  GSI Lumonics unveiled a series of low-power DPSS lasers. Emitting output powers from 5 to 10W, the Spectron SLD6000 series is said to suit a variety of materials processing applications including micromachining of both metals and polymers. Sources in the range feature Nd:YAG or Nd:YVO₄ crystals and come with a choice of water or air-cooling. Direct or fiber-coupled options are also available.

•  Visitors to Newport's booth could see a demonstration of what the firm claims is the most advanced optical table on the market. The SmartTable makes utilizes Newport’s patent-pending damping technology and includes two active vibration dampers that dissipate to all the table’s natural vibration modes without creating additional resonances at lower frequencies. It also contains built-in sensors which allow the user to monitor vibrations in real time.

•  Fiber laser maker SPI announced five new products on the first day of the exhibition. There were four additions to the firm’s redPower series: a 2 – 20 W compact laser module emitting at 1090 nm; a 20-25 W continuous wave/modulated (CWM) device at 1090 nm; a 100 W CWM source at 1090 nm and a 5-10 W laser module at 1550 nm. SPI also unveiled a 1550 nm pulsed laser module – the first in its redEnergy range.

•  Nufern of the US also announced a line of continuous wave fiber laser modules with three power ranges at a wavelength of 1 µm. Available output power ranges are 2-15 W, 15-25 W and 25-50 W. All units contain Nufern’s high-power optical fibers.

•  nLight introduced a line of single-emitter multimode diode lasers in a standard C-mount package. The emitters are available in wavelengths ranging from 635 to 1600 nm and output powers from 0.5 to 5 W. nLight’s 5 W device is a 200 µm broad area emitter at 808 nm with an operating current of 5000 mA and spectral width of less than 2 nm. The 0.5 W device is a 150 µm broad area emitter at 635 nm.

•  Femtolasers of the US is now offering a Ti:sapphire oscillator that produces pulses shorter than 7 fs. Called the Rainbow, the system offers an average power of more than 200 mW corresponding to in excess of 0.35 MW of peak power. The laser has a center wavelength of 800 nm and a repetition rate of 78 MHz.

•  Coherent has added 940 and 980 nm versions to its series of fiber array package diode lasers. The units produce 40 W of continuous wave power through an 800 µm fiber bundle. The products are being targeted at medical applications as well as fiber laser pumping.

•  Redlake unveiled three new high-speed motion cameras. The MotionPro HS-1 and HS-2 offer a full-frame resolution of 1280x1024 pixels at 650 and 900 frames per second (fps) respectively. The HS-4 has a full frame resolution of 512x512 pixels at 5145 fps. Redlake adds that at a reduced resolution, frame rates in excess of 35000 fps can be achieved.