February 2, 2007, Tucson, AZ--In addition to its 3000 technical presentations, Photonics West 2007 (January 21-26; San Jose, CA) dished out technology in the form of solid new commercial products. One example of this is a stable, single-frequency fiber laser unveiled by NP Photonics; emphasizing insensitivity to vibration, the company terms the laser "The Rock" (although it looks more like a small brick).
The laser's indifference to vibration is achieved without the need of active stabilization, says the company. The fiber laser is well-suited for integration into OEM laser systems, and is being incorporated into multilaser systems used for field trials in the oil-field and security markets. Upon successful completion of these trials, the technology will be part of multimillion-dollar installations. The Rock is based on a passive-stabilization technique recently developed by NP Photonics for DWDM (dense wavelength-division multiplexing) fiber-optic sensing systems that combine the information from a number of spectral channels. This method significantly reduces the sensitivity of the frequency noise to vibration and low frequency acoustics.
According to Philippe Brak, vice president of sales and marketing at NP Photonics, the Rock, now ready for production, will reduce cost and complexity of actively stabilized multilaser systems by 50%. Philippe Brak noted that this is important because these multilaser systems are expected to double the productivity of oil fields and significantly increase the security of harbors.
Many uses
Optical sensing is critically important in oil and gas, homeland security, and industrial markets where the measurement of distance, temperature, and/or pressure is required for a broad range of applications. These applications include finding and monitoring of oil fields in order to increase their productivity, opto-acoustic sensing in submarine-towed arrays, monitoring and securing pipelines and power lines, and border and perimeter protection. Common to these applications is the need for high sensitivity and resolution, with real-time monitoring over long distances.
Multilaser systems are often used on ships, offshore platforms, and airplanes--all situations in which the environment introduces a large amount of vibration. To compensate for this effect, active stabilization has proven to be a useful technique that maintains the low phase noise of these lasers under typical field conditions. However, active stabilization is not without trade-offs and adds significant cost to multilaser systems. The new technology from NP is about 100 times less sensitive to vibration than conventional designs and thus eliminates the need for active stabilization and complex antivibration mounts, says NP Photonics.