Spire Corp. awarded SBIR grant
Spire Corporation (Bedford, MA) has received a $75,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation to develo¥a wavelength-multiplexed monolithic laser array for use in an infrared (IR) diode-laser spectrometer. Potential applications are in simultaneous trace-gas detection of a wide variety of atmospheric pollutants, hazardous gaseous species, explosive decomposition products, and biological agents. Currently, multitrace gas detection is possible only with complex and expensive multilaser systems or with FT-IR instruments, which do not have trace-gas sensitivities approaching those of tunable diode-laser spectrometers. Spire plans to use a quantum cascade laser to develo¥a junction-free semiconductor laser source that can be multiplexed over a large number of preselected wavelength regions in the mid-IR range, which is ideal for gas and trace-gas detection.