According to the Dutch company that is specialized on company for wideband lasers and technology, its new SLP-1000 is a revolutionary light source for industrial and medical imaging applications and for spectroscopy, sporting a high-quality, smooth, wide spectral output.
Supercontinuum lasers, also known as wideband lasers, provide immense bandwidth while maintaining high coherence and low noise. However, today’s industrial solutions are large and heavy, with limited environmental robustness, and require high power. Moreover, while they deliver a wide bandwidth of colors, a dominant color usually stands out, whereas the remaining colors are at exceedingly low relative power levels. Essentially, they are ‘wideband’ by technicality.
The new SLP-1000 is an industry-first portable wideband laser with a compact, battery-operated, and rugged design, weighing only 900 grams (32 oz) and having a form factor of less than 1 liter (<1 dm3).
The SLP-1000, based on PAD – Patterned Alternating Dispersion, offers a high-quality, coherent and stable spectral output (400 nm @ -3 dB, 1500 nm @ -20 dB) in the near-infrared (NIR) band at a repetition rate of 100 MHz with pulse durations around 20 fs.
It integrates a seed laser from Menlo Systems and the laser output is equipped with a Thorlabs-compatible screw thread (SM05), seamlessly integrating with other products from Thorlabs.
The short pulse duration of around 20 fs, achieved with the SLP-1000, is also a testament to the advantages of having highly efficient SC 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. SLP-1000 then provides high-quality nonlinear pulse compression for application fields such as third harmonic surface imaging and transient absorption spectroscopy.
