PHOTONICS SPECTRA’S SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL PHOTONICS AWARDS CEREMONY

KOHERAS A/S – winner of the 2004 Circle of Excellence Awards

SuperK™ – Supercontinuum Source

An ultra compact supercontinuum light source with broadband, diffraction-limited output from the UV to the IR (400 to beyond 2000 nm), the SuperK™ manufactured by KOHERAS A/S of Birkerød, Denmark, is based on a proprietary compact pump laser design and a patent-pending dual wavelength pumping scheme. It also provides continuum radiation in the technologically important blue and near-UV spectral regions. Previous supercontinuum light sources that could provide this coverage were based on Ti:Sapphire-laser-pumped systems and were expensive, very large and complicated to operate.

The turnkey light source integrates easily into instruments and systems for industrial measurement tasks and for general use as s research tool. It also is suitable for high-resolution optical coherence tomography, where it performs rapid scanning in the medical environment, and for white light interferometry, where it determines the displacement or the chromatic dispersion in fibre and planar waveguides with high accuracy. Other applications include fibre and waveguide attenuation measurement in photonic device testing, confocal microscopy and fast data acquisition for spectroscopy in biology, chemistry, medicine and environmental monitoring.

Its output spectrum can be tailored to specific applications by changing the nonlinear photonic crystal fibre that is used to generate the continuum, offering enhanced functionality and value from the current platform.