PRO’s long-standing background collaboration with the Furukawa subsidiary OFS is bearing its first commercial fruits. The first system of the new Raman fiber laser series (RFL) has just been delivered by PRO to the customer in the USA. The RFLs are cascaded Raman fiber lasers that can emit various wavelengths in the IR due to several Raman shifts, starting from an Yb fiber laser. Compared to typical TOPTICA lasers, this emission is broadband (> 1 nm), so the lasers have nothing to do with the Raman fiber amplifiers we use in our Guide Star Lasers. The system that has just been delivered is a pure CW system with 50 W output power at a wavelength of 1480 nm and is used to pump an erbium fiber amplifier. The end application is in satellite communications, so thematically not even that far away from our core guide star laser business.
We were particularly pleased with the positive customer feedback: “I’m delighted to tell you the Toptica RFL performs flawlessly. Over the range we’ve tested, the output power matches the data provided in the acceptance test report you included with the unit. We’ve also tested both the response to a loss of seed signal (LOS) and the emergency stop (ESTOP). The software is well designed both functionally and from a human factors point of view. The manual is very professionally composed, organized and thorough. I have no substantive or actionable suggestions for improvement. Well done!”
Another two systems with wavelengths of 1690 nm and 1640 nm and outputs of up to 100 W are currently being set up. In addition to the CW mode, one of them also has a microsecond pulse mode (> approx. 5 µs), for which a special high-current pulse driver has been developed from scratch over the past few months.
