PW2010: Powering up at Coherent

Laura S. Marshall

At the biggest photonics trade show of the year, the bigger companies tend to go big: big booths, big contingents of reps, big news. And Coherent Inc. is no exception. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company arrived at the show ready to release a number of new products.

In biological and other life sciences, the trend is toward higher power, said Matthias Schulze, director of technical marketing. Higher power enables better resolution for applications including confocal microscopy, flow cytometry, DNA sequencing and the like.

Coherent has launched at the show two new compact CW visible lasers from its Sapphire line: 532 nm (green) lasers with a choice of either 200 mW or 300 mW output. The new lasers are based on the company’s optically pumped semiconductor laser (OPSL) technology and designed specifically for bioinstrumentation.

Another trend Schulze noted is DNA sequencing, pointing out that another newly launched product at the show allows researchers to sequence DNA at higher speeds and lower costs. Coherent’s new Genesis CX355-250 laser is a CW ultraviolet solid-state instrument that uses OPSL technology to provide low noise and high output power, with power scalability Schulze called “a nice response to the market need.”

Marco Arrigoni, technical marketing director, was on hand to discuss a few other newly released products.

The Verdi G7 belongs to Coherent’s Verdi G family, which is made up of low-noise CW lasers based on OPSL technology, which eliminates “green noise” found in diode-pumped solid-state lasers but allows multiple-mode operation. It provides 7 W of power and is intended primarily for pumping Ti:sapphire laser systems. Applications include spectroscopy and materials research.

The Legend Elite Duo-HP Ti:sapphire ultrafast laser amplifier system provides the highest power on the market without requiring cryo cooling, Arrigoni said. Relying on thermoelectric cooling, the amplifier delivers up to 15 W of power and can be configured to provide output pulse durations of up to 25 fs. It can pump multiple stages, he said, with plenty of power available at each wavelength; some applications for the Legend Elite Duo-HP include time-resolved spectroscopy using multiple optical parametric amplifiers, high-field physics and THz generation.

The new Legend Elite CEP amplifier is “the gateway to attosecond physics,” Airrigoni said. Its launch makes Coherent the first and only company to offer a complete carrier envelope phase (CEP)-stabilized system designed, built and supported by the same manufacturer. It’s seeded by Coherent’s Micra CEP oscillator and delivers a sub-35 fs pulse with a repetition rate of 1 kHz; it is now available with up to 4 W of average power and 4 mJ per pulse, and more configurations are expected to be released.

Other new products from Coherent include the Sapphire 514 LP is a 514 nm (green) instrument, another new CW visible laser in its Sapphire family, and new additions to its CUBE FP fiber pigtailed diode laser products.

Laura S. Marshall
laura.marshall@photonics.com