CLEO news: Tuesday
17 Jun 2002
Deformable mirrors, nano-positioning kit and a pulse profiling system are revealed at the exhibit.
The
Conference for Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) exhibit opened its doors to delegates today with 326 different companies eager to show-off their latest offerings. Here's what caught our eye:
BlueLase, US, a 1 year-old subsidiary of Selectron, unveiled a compact diode-pumped solid-state blue laser operating at 473 nm. Packaged into a 4 x 8 cm module, the frequency-doubled YAG laser comes with 30 and 50 mW output powers.
Mad City Labs of Madison, Wisconsin, US announced the availability of a range of high-precision, three-axis nano-positioning systems. The company says its Nano-LP series offers travel ranges up to 200 µm in the x and y directions, and 100 µm in the z direction with sub-nanometer accuracy.
Boston University spin-off Boston Micromaching Corporation, US, used CLEO to debut its range of deformable mirrors. The mirrors have dimensions of 3 x 3 mm. Having won a government small business innovative research (SBIR) grant, the company has successfully secured orders from the Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. Here the mirrors are used in retinal imaging and correcting the distortion in a point-to-point laser communication system over 50 km.
A real-time ultrashort-pulse characterization system is now available from Swamp Optics, US. The company, launched out of Georgia Tech only six months ago, is the brainchild of Rick Trebino, a pioneer in this area. The Grenouille device is capable of measuring the intensity and phase versus time and frequency; spatial profile; wavelength and beam spatial chirp.
Coherent, US, launched what it claims is the first hands-free, single box Ti:Sapphire laser to tune in excess of 210 nm. Called Chameleon, the laser provides femtosecond pulses tunable from 720 nm to greater than 930 nm. The company says the laser is ideal for applications ranging from multiphoton excitation microscopy to nonlinear spectroscopy.
Lambda-Physik showcased its new compact, high-repetition rate industrial excimer laser. Called Novatex, the laser delivers a stabilized output energy of 16 mJ at 248 nm. The company says that the average output power of up to 16 W at 1 kHz makes the laser ideal for micromachining applications.
Author
Jacqueline Hewett is news reporter on Optics.org and Opto & Laser Europe magazine.
