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 selected wavelengths from 4.5–13 µm.
These lasers have output powers above 0.5 W at pulse lengths of 200 ns. Applications can be found wherever one needs to look through materials that are not transparent for visible and near-IR wavelengths. In these cases it is now possible to try a different wavelength range. The use of MIR in free space data transmission also yields benefits: Compared to 1.55 µm there is 850x less loss due to Rayleigh scattering, 18x less loss due to Mie scattering, 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.
