Best tunable cw laser around 1.5 um?

So, I have a bit of end-of-the-year money, and I want to buy a tunable CW source in the 1.5 um vicinity. I'm not too choosy about centre wavelength, but somewhere in the 1480-1630 nm band, and with the maximum tunability consistent with reasonable noise (say 30 dB above shot noise, maximum). Power level is also not too critical, but I'll need at least

1 mW in a single-mode fibre at some point.

I'm looking at the following.

An external-cavity diode laser (pretty good, nice narrow line, tuning range only a couple of percent--a bit small)

A collection of DFB lasers (cheaper, potentially wider wavelength range, but much less convenient)

Something else if there is anything.

Price is negotiable depending on how much I like it.

Suggestions?

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Reply to
Phil Hobbs
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Does Burleigh still make their FCL? When I used one in another life, it put out many tens of mW single mode around 1.5 um.

Reply to
elephantcelebes

No, but I know a number of people who still baby sit them. You have to keep the crystal cold, if it warms it is gone, and AFAIK there is no source for new ones.

josh halpern

Reply to
Joshua Halpern

Not common, but there are several HeNe IR lines including one right on

1500nm. Not really tunable but probably the lowest all-round noise solution. Better beam coherency and choice of polarization. Power to 20mw or so.

Matt.

Reply to
matt vk3zmw

Hi Phil -

Go with an ECL laser, they are still not that expensive in the C&L bands, and the tuning ranges are much better than what you get at other wavelengths.

Santec makes several flavors of widely tunable (80-100 nm) ECL lasers over that band. We got one on loan from them for a month and people seemed happy with it. Don't have any recollection of cost, though I thought one of their versions was around $10K. They have specs at

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You've probably checked with New Focus, but they also make widely tunable ECL lasers in the C-band. Their supposedly mode-hop-free-over-36 nm version is only $6K (model TLB-3901). Of course, you could go all out and get their newest Venturi system which is $30K, but mode-hop free over 110 nm (they say).

Don't know if these are the best, but they probably do what you want.

Frank.

Reply to
Lineshape

To clarify, the TLB-3901 is a DFB system, the Venturi and Velocity are ECDL.

Frank

Reply to
Lineshape

An erbium doped fiber laser would be at your 1.5micron wavelength and can have up to 50nm or more of bandwidth and is tunable. you can get these with high avg powers upwards of 20 watts possibilly more.

-Jake C.

Reply to
d00d

I have been out of the 1550nm business for a bit but we were always happy with the Santec lasers and used them all the time. New Focus came and gave us the sales pitch on their version which looked very nice but we didn't have the cash to purchase it. Newport got in the game but we never looked at their units. There are probably lots more companies out there now that WDM is more common. ILX Lightwave probably has something out by now. I have been very happy with their other products.

Best Regards, P. Danek

Phil Hobbs wrote:

Reply to
danek

Does anybody know if there are narrow linewidth (nm) lasers around actually? The ECLs, DFB etc.. all have not-so narrow linewidths i think. thanks!

Phil Hobbs wrote:

Reply to
Lukas

You might look at

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They advertise 3 kHz and 200 Hz lasers in the telecom band, but I'm not positive their fiber lasers are tunable.

Bret Cannon

Reply to
Bret Cannon

I was going to mention NP photonics - we have a few of their lasers. You won't get nm's of tuning like you are asking about, more like a few tens of GHz. The ones we have are all thermally tunable. Our measurements of the linewidth on the 3 kHz system was more like 40-50 kHz. This was about two years ago, and I think the newer batches that say 2-3 kHz are closer to spec. The way they measured linewidth at the time was invalid, in my opinion. We have not measured their 200 Hz system.

Frank

Reply to
Lineshape

I do spectroscopy. My primary issue is that the laser can be tuned smoothly over some region (the bigger the better, hence New Focus), and tuned over the entire region of interest in segments which overlap. Wavelength and amplitude stability are other important issues. Intensity is not so important. I seem to recall that the Santec cannot do this. Any other comments, advice? I may be in the market for one soon

josh halpern

L> I was going to mention NP photonics - we have a few of their lasers. You

Reply to
Joshua Halpern

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