Desktop Ultra-Short Pulse Laser at 1552 nm

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Desktop Ultra-Short Pulse Laser at 1552 nm

• Ultrashort Pulse Laser Materials Interaction
  Workshop
• DIRECTED ENERGY PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY (DEPS)
• 9-28-06
• L. Vaissié, T. Yilmaz, A. Stadler, D. Goldman,
  M. Farley, J. Lammers,
• T. Saunders, K. Kim, D. Lijana, L. Collura, M.
  Mielke, T. Booth

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UltraShort Pulse (USP) Lasers
Long Pulse or CW Lasers
USP Lasers
Metal ablation with femtosecond (right) vs.
nanosecond (left) ablation.
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UltraShort Pulse (USP) Lasers

• Immense power in each pulse
• Non-thermal, precision ablation
• Little or no trauma/damage to remaining material
• Ablates any material
• Diagnostics, sensing, other non-ablative
  properties
• One source, many uses

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Interesting capabilities, but impractical
Compelling Capabilities, but Experimentation
and Exploration are Difficult Requires Ph.D.s to
operate and maintain Very Expensive
Impractical/Impossible to Deploy
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Until Raydiance
We took complicated apparatus
and turned it into this

• Pulse width lt 3 ps
• M2 lt 1.8
• Average Power 2.5 W

• Any room, 110 v outlet (800 W)
• Pulse energy 1 to 5 µJ
• Wavelength 1552.5 µm
• Pulse rate 25 kHz - 500 kHz

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Classic CPA Approach

• Mostly fiber-based components
• High power, dispersion and nonlinearity managed
  miniature optical network

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Fiber Integrated Hardware

• Use off-the-shelf fiber optics for seed pre-amp
  stages
• Team with strategic partners for subassemblies
• Build what we cant buy
• There are constraints
• Peak power density very high in fiber
• Operation near damage threshold
• Optical nonlinearities
• Novel fibers require special attention
• Multimode effects
• Parasitic energy losses due to high dopant levels

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Raydiance User Interface (UI)
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Desktop USP System Pulse Quality
Intensity Autocorrelation
Integrated Energy
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Further Signal Quality Data
Retrieved from FROG E-field FWHM 843 fs AC
FWHM 1.3 ps
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Pulse Train Extinction Data
Sensitive Measurement through RF Spectra
Raydiance High ER System
? lt 0.05 dB Harmonic Amplitude
Extinction Ratio, Rextgt 35 dB
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Raydiance Development Platform

• Disruptive USP capabilities
• Compact, reliable and cost-effective
• Intelligent laser makes USP easy to use
  integrate
• Liberates USP from specialized research labs
• Application experts, not laser Ph.D.s
• Practical to deploy

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Applications Examples
Early Adopters Validating Vision
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U.S. Food and Drug Administration

• Device Evaluation and Basic Research Under CRADA
• Up and running 30 minutes out of packing crate
• 150 days of intense exploration/experimentation
• MDs, not physicists (Johns Hopkins U of MD)
• Next generation LASIK
• Novel cancer treatment approaches
• DDS office of the future
• Gene transfection
• More experiments planned immune response,
  arthritis treatment, tattoo removal and many more

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Ophthalmic Experimentation

• Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins
• 1 ophthalmic program in country
• Intrastromal refractive surgery (flapless Lasik)
• Flap lock down designs and procedures
• Corneal transplant/implant procedures

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Oncology Experimentation

• FDA Research Group
• Effects of non-destructive irradiation
• Three lines of malignant cancers
• Various energy/rep rate levels
• Two weeks of experimentation

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Darrell B. Tata, Ph.D.
A Few Days Of Experimentation
Faster Time-to-Invention
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Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab

• Captive government lab DoD applications
• Up and running just like FDA system
• Distance interrogation and detection of materials
• Differentiate explosive, chemical and biological
  materials
• Define power (distance) specifications
• Evaluate feasibility for deployment for HLS and
  DoD
• Also may collaborate on medical applications

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Army Institute of Surgical Research

• Pioneer new clinical treatments/surgical
  approaches
• Smart-Knife prototype
• For treatment of profound burn trauma
• Smart laser differentiates healthy from
  unhealthy/dead tissue
• Rapidly ablate unhealthy tissue leave healthy
  tissue
• Less trauma, bleeding, better graft success

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J. Craig Venter Institute

• 1st to sequence the human genome
• Gene transfection
• Improve process in animal and plant transfection
• Could have huge impact on bio-agra business
• Could be critical to success of emerging
  synthetic biology sector
• For-profit enterprise spun out last year

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Other Projects

• Vaporizing tattoos
• Acne and sun damage treatment
• Pathology
• Minimally-invasive (fiber optic) smart-surgery
• Polymer and composite material processing
• Sub-dermal ablation
• Black silicon (solar energy)
• And many others in discussion

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USP Technology Directions
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Raydiance Bragg Fiber for USP

• Large diameter, hollow core
• to sustain high peak power
• without appreciable distortion
• Delivery of ultrashort laser
• pulses
• Temporal pulse compression
• for all-fiber CPA systems

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Bragg Fiber for High Energy, USP Delivery
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Early Results

• USP light is versatile potentially very
  disruptive
• V1.0s relatively low power level is enabling
  important uses right out of gate
• Ease of use, computer-control supports rapid
  experimentation
• Developers/inventors beginning to stake claims
• Important discoveries
• IP capture
• Commercialization

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Product Roadmap Will Broaden Markets

• Increased Power
• Near term 10-25 µJ/pulse (on target)
• Navy project 2.5 mJ/pulse (on target)
• More features
• User adjustable pulse duration
• Broader rep rate ranges
• More software modules
• Fiber beam delivery
• Lower cost of goods initiatives to drive volume
  markets

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Commercialization A Platform Play
Production Version
Developer Platform
Volume Production
Application powered by Raydiance At
market-enabling cost of goods Owned by
Application Developer
Invention IP Development Concept
Validation Rapid Prototyping