New Ultrafast Fiber Lasers Combine Performance And Reliability

Two new ultrafast fiber lasers from Coherent, Inc. (Santa Clara, CA) (Nasdaq: COHR) offer a groundbreaking combination of high average power and short pulsewidth, thus enabling high intensity focusing for applications ranging from optogenetics research to cutting edge commercial uses, such as scribing and rapid prototyping. Specifically, the new Fidelity 10 and Fidelity 18 offer 10W and 18W of output power, respectively, with a pulsewidth of 140 fs, at a wavelength of 1040 nm. When combined with the superior beam quality (M² < 1.2) from these lasers, the result is significantly higher peak power and focused intensity than from any competitive laser. Plus, the software adjustable, internal pre-compensator allows the user to optimize the pulsewidth and peak power at the sample or workpiece.

Fiber lasers are well-known to deliver important practical advantages, such as low maintenance, hands-free reliability, long-term stability, and low cost of ownership. These new Fidelity lasers are the first on the market to combine all these practical advantages, together with groundbreaking power performance in a package suited for both scientific applications and harsh industrial settings. They also benefit from Coherent’s HALT/HASS, “Industrial revolution in ultrafast lasers” program, which has eliminated the traditional laser trade-offs between reliability and performance.

These new Fidelity lasers are ideal for many, high brightness, ultrafast applications. For example, in optogenetics, the high power will enable simultaneous photo activation of larger neural cell populations, supporting increasingly complex experiments. The lasers will also deliver faster imaging speeds in multiphoton excitation (MPE) applications. In addition, their stability, high power and superior beam quality make these new Fidelity lasers well-suited to non-linear optics applications, including pumping tunable optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) or non-linear fibers.  These same characteristics also make them excellent tools for microprocessing applications, such as scribing, 2-photon rapid prototyping, waveguide writing, microfluidics, and surface processing.

Founded in 1966, Coherent, Inc. is a world leader in providing photonics based solutions to the commercial and scientific research markets, and is part of the Standard & Poor’s SmallCap 600 Index and the Russell 2000.  Please direct any questions about this press release to Darryl McCoy, Director of Product Marketing, +44 141 945 8181.  For more information about Coherent, including product and financial updates, visit our website at www.Coherent.com.