lasers treating me a little better today

April 3, 2006 at 5:36 pm | | everyday science, hardware

Although the OPO is still not working after several more attempts at re-aligning (and the Millenia 532-nm laser across the hall is out for repair/replacement) I have some good news in the laser department. I got (at least for the time being) a 532-nm source: a little 12-mW diode laser that another lab member used to use. I made a neat stand for it out of a bunch of random aluminum pieces I found around lab (with some minor drilling required). Now I have two colors directly on my table, look:

twolasers

Now I can switch between 488 nm and 532 nm when I look at different samples, simply by flipping a little mirror:

bluegreen

The best part is that it only took me 20 minutes to align into the fiber, which has taken me days in the past. My trick is to first make sure the spot goes evenly through the coupler (by taking off the fiber), then aligning the beam path using a multimode fiber. That’s pretty easy, but it gives you a coarse alignment. Then I replace the multimode with my fiber and maximize the output. Today, it worked like a charm.

Now here are my lasers:

beampath

In this picture, the flippy mirror is up, so 532 goes into the fiber coupler and the 488 beam scatters off the back of the flippy. With a flip of that mirror, the 488 goes perfectly into the fiber and will only require minor retweaking downstream! The best part is that both prefiber alignments are orthogonal, so I don’t have to worry about screwing up one color if I want to mess with the other (as long as I don’t touch the coupler or the mirror immediately before the coupler, of course). I was pretty thrilled with this, especially because all the rest of the lasers I’m trying to use are the suck right now.

5 Comments »

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  1. This is so Real Genius, except without the geniuses, or is it “genii”?

    Comment by jordan — April 3, 2006 #

  2. Very pretty, these lasers of yours.

    Comment by R Lord — April 4, 2006 #

  3. Good work, son.

    Comment by Alvin — April 13, 2006 #

  4. I AM SO PROUD OF YOU. SERIOUSLY. I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT TWO COLORS INTO THE SAME FIBER. (i need to get a life)

    Comment by kallie — April 18, 2006 #

  5. […] In an older post, I talked about aligning multiple lasers on my setup. Now I have a cool picture of all of them (I used a little liquid nitrogen for scattering): […]

    Pingback by Everyday Scientist » three lasers — June 6, 2006 #

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