Live From Photonics West 2012: Long-Lasting Laser-Driven Light Source

Paul Blackborow of Energetiq Technology, Inc., shows their EQ-99 laser-driven light source, which has very high brightness across UV-Vis-NIR (170 nm to 2100 nm). Because they are using laser-driven technology, the light source will last for an extremely long time — units in their laboratory have operated for more than 10,000 hours.

Video Transcript

Paul Blackborow: Hi I am Paul Blackborow and I am with Energetiq Technology. Here we are showing our novel laser driven light source.

This is an extremely unusual light source where we are making a super bright broadband light source with an extremely long life.

The basic principle is that we use a laser to create xenon plasma inside a bulb. In this particular version of the product here, the EQ-99 we show that we have the power supply which contains the laser, the laser is going into the lamp house and then the light is collected into a small xenon bulb.

We are then taking the light from the bulb and focusing into a small optical fiber delivering a huge amount of light from a very tiny spot; it is a super bright light spot.

The novel things about this light source are that it has a very, very broad spectrum. It covers light all the way from the very deepest ultraviolets over here at 170 nanometers all the way out into the near infrared at 2 microns.

It has a very flat spectrum and because we are using this laser driven technology the light source will last for an extremely long time. We have units in our laboratory that have operated for more than 10,000 hours of light time. We do not expect that our customers are going to have to change the bulbs very frequently.

There are three different versions of the product. The laser driven light source with the fiber coupling will deliver the light in a very small diameter of space at 200 microns per fiber.

We have a free space version of the same unit; the EQ-99 where the customer can collect their own light and put it into their own optics mounted on our optical table.

We have a higher powered version, the EQ-1500 which is delivering even more power and brightness. These are laser and light sources that are really optimized for very high brightness applications such as spectroscopy and imaging applications where light in a small spot is absolutely required.

We deliver the highest brightness, a magnitude brighter than typical arc lamps and 2 orders of magnitude brighter than a traditional [inaudible: 2:10] lamps. We are able to deliver much more light into a much smaller spot than any other competing technology.

That combined with a very long life gives customers a very high valuable product.

Thank you.