RPMC Lasers Blog

Whether a diode laser is a traditional monolithic design or utilizes an external cavity configuration, the laser light must still propagate through the diode’s PN-junction via a ridge waveguide.   As a result, the beam profile of edge emitting diodes is unique when compared to all laser sources because of the asymmetric geometry of this optical cavity.  This issue often leads to confusion about how to properly integrate open beam laser diodes into yo… Read More

Jenoptik will be presenting its latest development in the field of high-power laser sources for industrial material processing, and in particular for direct diode laser applications. The new diode laser with passive cooling makes quite the impression with its extremely high power output of 275 watts and long service life in both CW and hard pulse app… Read More

Bright Solutions’ sub-ns DPSS lasers are field proven subsystems for portable lidar sensors. Many successful installations worldwide have confirmed the reliability of these laser sources in land vehicles, as well as airplanes and helicopters. Maintaining the concept of a ruggedized all-in-one IP 67 package, Bright Solutions has now developed several higher power versions, featuring over 100W of average power at 1064 nm, with pulse durations in the range of 300 to 900 ps, and a repetition rate up to … Read More

After several years of in-house testing and intensive testing in the field for some pilot programs, Bright Solutions is happy to announce their new UV versions of the Wedge Lasers, the industrial sub-ns DPSS laser solution. The Wedge HF and XF offer a pulse width less than 450ps, peak power up to 80 kW, are configurable in several frequency ranges from Single Shot to 200 kHz, and include the low jitt… Read More

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a common term in the medical community which has been used to describe treatments ranging from near-infrared laser-induced vascular dilatation to photo-thermal excitation of nanorods embedded in cancer tumors.    For the purposes of this blog, we are going to focus on a rapidly growing subset of PDT where laser light is used to activate both dermal and subdermal treatments utilizing a specialized drug, called a photosensitiz… Read More

Bright Microlaser’s activity is focused on continuous development, pursuing higher reliability, simplified usability, maintenance and service for its devices. This opens up more and more opportunities in new markets and emerging applications, making Bright Microlaser a leading man… Read More

Laser-based techniques have been gaining more and more popularity in the medical and biomedical fields.  In previous posts, we have discussed a wide variety of such applications ranging from Laser Diode Crown Troughing in Dentistry to Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) in Biomedical Applications, and in this blog post, we are going to take a look at another up and coming technique called Photoacoustic … Read More

At RPMC we are excited to announce the release of our most recent white paper focused on fluorescence microscopy titled “Multi-Wavelength Laser Sources for Multi-Color Fluorescence Microscopy.”  Multi-color fluorescence microscopy is a widely used technique to generate multi-spectral images of cells and other small objects for identifying the spatial distribution of molecules of interest in complex heterogeneou… Read More

Raman spectroscopy is one of the fastest growing and most diverse applications in all of laser spectroscopy.  As a result, it can be rather challenging at times to sift through the wide-ranging laser options all being marketed for Raman spectroscopy.  In this application note we will tackle one of the most common questions that arises when picking a laser for Raman spectroscopy; “Should I chose a single-spatial mode or multi-spatial mode laser for my application?”  On the surface, this seems like a simple question since Raman is a nonlinear optical effect and therefore the tighter the beam can be focused the higher the conversion efficiency.  Seemingly a single-mode laser would be preferable, but in practice there are other factors that can complicate … Read More

The popularity of laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) has been rapidly growing since its introduction in the 1960s, and is now used in industrial, military, scientific, and medical applications.  Nowadays LIBS is rapidly becoming an indispensable tool for elemental analysis and is generally viewed as a complementary technique to other elemental methods such as mass spectrometry.  Within the medical field, LIBS can be used for analyzing hard/calcified tissues, soft tissues, biomedical specimens; as well as disease detection and even during laser-guided surgery.  In this application note, we will explore these uses of LIBS in the medical/biomedical application space, by taking a look at some of the common applications as well as both laser and system requirements.  It is important to note that … Read More

Semiconductor materials are unique among laser gain materials for their extremely high index of refraction.  As a result of this large index difference at the air/semiconductor interface, each facet of a laser diode naturally acts as a partially reflective mirror (~32%).   This gives diode lasers the unique property of having a built-in resonator which is capable of lasing without any external optics or coatings and providing an extremely low-cost solution for applications such as laser pointers, where performance isn’t the primar… Read More

When attempting to measure ultra-low-frequency vibrations it is challenging collect a clear spectrum because of the proximity to the laser line. In this blog post, we will examine how holographic filters can be used in conjunction with single frequency DPSS lasers to get around these dif… Read More

In this blog post we are going to take a look at two most commonly used fiber laser dopants erbium (Er) and ytterbium (Yb) which both have a strong absorption peak at 976 nm, but who’s bandwidths vary dramatically causing one to require a wavelength stabilized d… Read More

The single most commonly used laser procedure in dentistry is crown troughing, because of its ability to distend the tissue in much time as traditional retraction techniques. In this blog post we dive into what exactly crown troughing is and what the laser requirements are for such an ap… Read More

Optical technologies are widely used in anti-counterfeiting. One of the newer methods combines laser marking & micromachining to embed microscopic 2D barcodes directly onto the item. This blog post explores the types of lasers used, & the system level requirements for high-resolution 2D… Read More

In addition to our knowledge center which hosts our blogs, application notes, and white papers we have just added a brand new application section. This applications page organizes over 50 popular laser applications into easy to search categories ranging from laser welding to h… Read More

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced this year’s Noble prize in physics was being awarded “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics.” The award is to be split between optical tweezers and chirped pulse amplification (enabling attosecond pulse ge… Read More

In this blog we look at the application of machine vision in the transportation industry for laser rail inspection where high-power laser diodes. Laser rail inspection systems use high-speed cameras & high power laser line projectors to acquire high-res images and 3D profiles of rai… Read More

During any manufacturing process, there is some statistical variation in the finished product.  Resistor manufacturing is no different, and for many years traditional bulk and chip resistors have been tested and sorted into bins and labeled based upon these tolerances.  Board mount chip resistors are also similarly tolerance using a numerical code instead of a color code, but the end result is the same.  However, this is not feasible in larger format thick-film or thin-film intergraded circuits which require initial calibration, such as operational amplifiers, voltage dividers, and oscillators, where the resistors are one small detail in a much more complex arc… Read More

In our last blog post, “Laser Amplification for Power Scaling,” we discussed how an optical amplifier can be used to increase the power of a seed laser while maintaining its performance characteristics.  The same basic principle can be applied to a laser itself, with a method known as injection seeding.  In this case, a single frequency laser is sent into the laser cavity therefore selectively reducing the gain threshold at that specific frequency as shown in the fig… Read More

Modern lasers come in a seemingly endless variety ranging from diode lasers as small as a grain of rice to CO2 lasers the size of a refrigerator. The one thing that all of these lasers have in common is that they contain the three basic components of a laser: gain medium, resonator, and excitation source. If any of these three components are missing, achieving threshold and starting the lasing process would be impossible. In this blog post, we will examine what happens when the resonator is removed from this equation, resulting in an optical amplifi… Read More

Continuing with our recent theme of application for laser diode bars and stacks, in this post we will take a look at laser cladding.  If you haven’t already read our previous post titled “Understanding Laser Diode Arrays,” or have a basic understanding of laser diode bars and stacks we’d highly recommend you check out that post before reading … Read More

In this post, we will take a looking to industrial laser welding and why high power (multi-kilowatt) fiber coupled diode lasers are ideal for this application. This is accomplished by looking at the differences industrial laser cutting and laser welding system req… Read More

By combining TOF lidar at 1.5 micros with an InGaAs camera, you can produce a hypercube or “point cloud” containing a three-dimensional image of the target. This technique known as active night vision laser imaging, is discussed in this post, as well as which laser is best for this ap… Read More

At RPMC we offer one of the widest ranges of laser diodes on the market, and if you have been following us for some time now, we often mention that we offer both single emitters and arrays (bars).  In this blog post we are going to take a look at exactly what we mean when we talk about diode bars, but in order to do that, we need to first take a small detour and talk about the role of the ridge waveguide in laser diodes i… Read More