In addition to its well established product line of pulsed laser diodes at 905 nm and 1550 nm LASER COMPONENTS is also offering pulsed lasers at 4.7 µm, 5.5 µm and 9.5 µm.
These lasers have output powers above 0.5 W at pulse lengths of 200 ns. Applications are in the field of security, e.g. if one needs to look through materials that are not transparent for visible and near-IR wavelengths. In these cases it is now possible to exploit a different wavelength range. Benefits are also found in free space data transmission in the MIR: Compared to 1.55 µm there is 850x less loss due to Rayleigh dispersion, 18x less loss due to Mie dispersion, and at least 7x less loss due to scintillation.
In an experiment, two free space transmission setups were compared, one operating at 1.55 µm, the other at 8 µm. At virtually zero visibility both transmissions broke down. The difference, however, showed when the fog cleared. The MIR based transmission was stable again one hour earlier than the NIR link! [Source: R. Martini, Free space optical laser links using mid-infrared quantum cascade laser, 3rd Workshop on Quantum Cascade Lasers, Freiburg, 2002].
Our MIR lasers are integrated into a complete, cell phone sized, laser head called QUANTA®-OEM including the necessary driver and controller.
