Bandwidth10 (Berkeley, CA) has developed an electrically tuned vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) emitting at a 1050 nm wavelength for optical-coherence tomography (OCT) applications. The laser (BW10-1050-T-T) is part of a family of VCSELs produced by Bandwidth10 that are based on the company's high-contrast grating (HCG) MEMS actuator technology. A HCG is a single-layer ultrathin grating made of a high-refractive-index material with a subwavelength period that, according to the company's website (http://www.bandwidth10.com/company.html) exhibits a much broader reflection band than conventional distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs).
Bandwidth10's VCSELs use the grating as the output cavity mirror; moving the grating via a MEMS actuator tunes the wavelength. "This laser shows a tuning range of 73+ nm, which we believe to be a record for an electrically pumped 1050 nm VCSEL," says Robert Lucas, marketing and sales at Bandwidth10. The lasers has a center wavelength of 1050 nm and an official tuning range of 60+ nm; linewidth is 60 MHz, typical output power is 1 mW, and coherence length is 2.5 m. Typical sweep rate is 0.2 MHz, with a maximum of 1.1 MHz. The emitter comes in a TO-56 can.
John Wallace was with Laser Focus World for nearly 25 years, retiring in late June 2022. He obtained a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and physics at Rutgers University and a master's in optical engineering at the University of Rochester. Before becoming an editor, John worked as an engineer at RCA, Exxon, Eastman Kodak, and GCA Corporation.
