In some cases, it is said that science is about truth, while design is about splitting the difference.
With one laser project in his lab in the College of Colorado’s Division of Electrical, PC, and Energy Designing, Shu-Wei Huang and his group are dealing with a split the difference to find new applications for a strong new innovation and make it more straightforward to popularize.
As they took a gander at the creative and very exact double brush spectroscopy being sharpened by mechanical design partner Greg Rieker and others, Huang’s group saw a chance to extend its applications.
“We’ve been attempting to see whether we can think twice about execution a tad to extraordinarily improve the engineering,” Huang said. “The application that we are particularly keen on is the biomedical application in light of the fact that in biomedical applications, you needn’t bother with a similar goal; you want to follow through with something like methane identification.”
The outcome is the counter-spreading all-typical scattering (CANDi) fiber laser, which won Bowen Li, a postdoctoral scientist in Huang’s lab, an honor from Optica in 2021.
The key has been an updated laser depression that considers light to travel both clockwise and counterclockwise, which basically makes two lasers out of one laser cavity. That, thusly, diminishes the quantity of complicated gadgets expected to be designed with two lasers in double brush gadgets, Huang made sense of.
“We’ve been experimenting to see if we can sacrifice some performance in order to drastically simplify the architecture. We are particularly interested in the biological application because it does not require the same resolution as something like methane detection.”
Shu-Wei Huang
“We decrease the intricacy in the laser plan, and we need to think twice about accuracy somewhat, yet it’s still far superior to the condition of craftsmanship apparatuses utilized in biomedical applications,” Huang said.
In the group’s latest Optica paper, they introduced new methods to reduce the CANDi laser’s general timing jitter, further demonstrating that the laser will be a decent choice for a large group of applications. That work won Ph.D. understudy Neeraj Prakash the best banner honor at Optica’s 2021 Laser Congress.
Huang said they’ve been working with a new business in Taiwan that is keen on involving CANDi for terahertz imaging—frequently utilized in evaluating for security and medications. A lab at Colorado State College is likewise exploring different avenues regarding the laser for Raman spectroscopy, which has applications in drugs and water quality observing.
“CANDi is another fiber laser design, and at the present moment, we are chipping away at a few ventures to disclose its maximum capacity for double brush applications,” Huang said.
More information: Neeraj Prakash et al, Relative timing jitter in a counterpropagating all-normal dispersion dual-comb fiber laser, Optica (2022). DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.458339
Bowen Li et al, Bidirectional mode-locked all-normal dispersion fiber laser, Optica (2020). DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.396304
Journal information: Optica
