Jul 21 2007
The newest Sapphire laser from Coherent, Inc. is a small-footprint OEM laser delivering 50 mW (CW) of output power at 488 nm.
The Sapphire 50 mW laser is primarily intended for biomedical instrumentation, such as flow cytometry, drug discovery, genetic screening and confocal microscopy. This power level will deliver increased sensitivity, leading to faster throughput and/or higher signal-to-noise for these applications, without increasing the instrument size or operating budget.
The Sapphire 50 mW is based on the same reliable, efficient, optically pumped semiconductor laser technology as its 10 mW and 20 mW versions, and also shares their same form factor, power requirements and beam characteristics. This commonality allows easy implementation in next-generation instruments based on the Sapphire industrial standard without requiring redesign. These shared characteristics also permit system builders to choose power levels from 10 to 50 mW, thus leveraging a single laser engine platform.
Until the advent of the Sapphire laser platform, applications for 488 nm output had to rely on power-hungry, air-cooled argon lasers. The all-solid-state Sapphire provides the advantages of smaller size, greater electrical efficiency, lower heat dissipation and substantially longer lifetime. The result is a dramatic reduction in cost of ownership over argon laser technology, making Sapphire the laser of choice (and even a retrofit option) for low- and medium-power applications in bioinstrumentation and semiconductor inspection.
http://www.coherent.com/