RESOURCES.

MANUALS

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QCL User Manual
S-4 CW Driver
S-4 CW Driver User Manual
TC-3 User Manual
ECLK User Manual
ECKL User Manual
S-2m QCL Pulser
S-2m Pulser User Manual

FACTSHEETS

CW Single Mode Laser
SWIR Laser Diodes
High Power QCL
High Power Source
QCL Frequency Comb
QCL Frequency Comb
External Cavity Laser Kit
QC-XT Chip Design
QC-XT Vernier Laser
High Heat Load (HHL) Housing
S2 QCL Pulser
QCL Pulsers

FAQ

The most delicate parts of a QCL are the laser chip itself and the bonds connecting it to the ceramic pads. Therefore the QCL should be touched only at the copper carrier (far from the laser chip and the bonds), or at the ceramic pads (again away from the bonds).

To insert it into or to take it out of the Starter Kit housing, gently grab the ceramic pad from above with fine tweezers, and whenever possible, carry the QCL placed flat on a stable surface. Take special care not to touch bonds nor the laser chip itself, since this can immediately destroy the QCL. More detailed instructions can be found in §7.1 of the manual.

The two most important things to keep in mind are:

  • Avoid contact of the front facet of the QCL with any object (like the walls of a box where it is stored).
  • Never allow water droplets to condensate on the QCL.

Pulsed QCLs are delivered with a datasheet. Typically, lasers are tested using 50 ns pulse lengths. If you wish to use shorter pulses, you can do so and the laser will react as shown on the datasheet, with the average power being accordingly lower at a fixed repetition rate. The shortest pulse length achievable with a LDD driver is 22 ns.

Longer pulse lengths will heat up the laser and cause chirp within the pulse and a decrease in peak power. If you intend to use longer pulse length, this should be specified at the time of purchase. A special datasheet can be produced.

Using a laser with pulsed lengths longer than specified in the datasheet is liable to void the warranty.

If you wish to take the risk, a good method is to use a fast detector (e.g. a MCT detector) and slowly increase the pulse length. The maximum workable pulse length will be the length at which the instantaneous power at the end of the pulse is 50% of the power at the beginning.

A CW QCL is tested only with continuous excitation, where any pulse longer than one millisecond is seen as “continuous”. The performances shown on the datasheet are the performance in the steady state and do not consider transient effects that occur in this first millisecond. It is also possible to use pulsed excitations of any shorter length on these lasers bearing in mind that:

  • The wavelength at the beginning of the peak will be shorter than the CW wavelength 
  • The signal will show chirp
  • The strength of the chirp can vary from one laser to another
  • There is no guarantee that the laser is single-mode with short pulses
 

The window thickness is 2.0 +/- 0.1 mm. The laser facet is 4.5 +/- 0.5 mm from the exterior facet of the window and 2.5 mm +/- 0.5 mm from the inside facet. The window is 1.0 +/- 0.2 mm recessed from the front of the LLH.

These connections are used when the datasheet of pulsed lasers is measured to evaluate the true power dissipation in the laser. In practice, they are not needed for using the laser as the current is the determining parameter for laser operation.
 
If a voltage monitor is nevertheless needed, you can connect to these pins using a LEMO Push-Pull Connector HGP.00.250.CTLPV, available at various distributors of electronic parts. Alpes does not distribute a cable for these connectors.
The instantaneous linewidth of a QCL can be extremely low, of the order of kHz. 

In practice however, the total noise of a system will almost always be given by the noise of the current driver and/or the temperature noise, and when that noise is much higher than the intrinsic noise you can consider the QCL as a perfect transducer and compute the effective amplitude or spectral noise from the datasheet.

The front facet of a QCL is only 20 to 50 micron square. Any optical feedback into the facet would require the optical system to be aligned sufficiently well to couple reflected light into that surface, which limits feedback in practice for large systems.
 
Additionally, our HHL devices use an angled window to avoid feedback from its surface placed close to the front facet.
 
Finally, QCLs are intrinsically robust in the presence of feedback; we refer to this article for more information.
The exact cooling solution to be adopted will depend not only on the laser chip used but also of its most commonly used parameters. A chip with low maximum current which is always used at temperatures higher than 15°C may not need any additional cooling at all, while a high threshold current chip which reaches a targeted wavelength at -30°C will require a strong cooling solution. 

That being said, using a flow rate of 0.3 l/min of water kept at a temperature in the 15°C-20°C range should be sufficient for most practical purposes.

There are two sources of heat in a HHL: the heat created by the laser itself, which can be read from the datasheet, and the heat created by the TEC which is equal to its power consumption and depends on the temperature differential between the laser chip and the baseplate of the HHL. The sum of these can reach up to 40W and must be dissipated away from the baseplate. Typical specifications require the baseplate to be kept at a temperature of 20°C.

While it is in every case required to connect the baseplate to a heat sink, different types of heatsinking methods can be used, from passive cooling to air cooling to water cooling. The HHL is designed to allow maximum flexibility in your system design by providing a minimal flat interface.

It should be noted, however, that only the bottom baseplate is directly heated and designed to be connected to the heat sink. It is not recommended nor useful to attach anything to the top plate of the HHL.

To protect the coatings on the lasers and avoid melting the indium solder used on some submounts, it is not recommended to heat the submounts to temperatures higher than 100°C, even temporarily.

 

The supplied control software is not fully a driver but a control panel that allows you to access the hardware. Access to this hardware must be allowed by your computer system in order to use it. Such access may depend on your particular system and Alpes cannot guarantee the correct working of your computer. Nevertheless, if you cannot see or use the ports you can follow these general guidelines:

 
  • Is the red LED light on the board (visible if you use the OEM version without protective box) lit? If it is not, check the power connection.
  • If you use the USB-to-serial adapter, while normally this device is automatically recognized by most distributions it could be not yet installed on your machine. You can download the drivers at http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm; follow the instructions on the site.
  • Under linux if libraries are missing installing libxcb-xinerama0 (through apt-get) should help
  • If you can see the correct port but the connect button does not work, you may not have access to the port. Launching the software with admin rights (i.e. using sudo under linux) may help.

The datasheets shown on the website are measurements taken on submounts. When the laser is encapsulated, the submount is soldered directly onto the thermoelectric cooler, sometimes improving thermal performance. A new measurement is taken immediately prior to shipment with the final performance.

Each laser is tested multiple time prior to delivery to ensure they will have a properly long expected lifetime. We can share some information on QCL lifetime assessment and testing.
 
The first level of testing is at the wafer level. When a new wafer is manufactured, several devices are tested at various levels  (bar-testing and mounted laser  characterization) before a laser is to be sold. This ensures that there are no generic  conditions that would affect all of the lasers that were produced.  
 
Additionally, each laser is then tested individually multiple times and the results of these tests are recorded on a datasheet that is unique to each laser. Each laser is re-tested prior to shipment. Thus, every shipped laser will have been tested more than once and on different days before you receive it to ensure quality.

Once in a while, some lasers are selected for long-time testing. Some have been tested for up to 32’000 hours of continuous operation at Alpes with no degradation of maximum performance. This external study has operated various types of QCLs for over 1.5 million device-hours and  has found that the mean time to failure of quantum cascade lasers operating at a heat-sink temperature of 25°C is expected to be 809’000 hours or 92 years of continuous operation. Furthermore, Alpes users have reported operating lasers in the field for extended periods of time.  A specific example can be found in this paper which describes an experiment that ran for 4 years uninterrupted with no degradation in performance.


In addition to the laser chip MTTF,  a typical laser package contains other parts that can degrade with time. In particular, the Peltier cooler will see its performance degrade with time and the coldest reachable temperature will slowly increase. Furthermore, the soldering of the chip to the submount may degrade which will affect the effective temperature of operation to reach a specific wavelength. These effects are slow and can be reversed by re-encapsulating the chip if the specifications are no longer reached within the warranty period. By design, packaged lasers should remain within their specifications for up to 5 years.

The emission from a QCL is always polarized linearly with the electric field perpendicular to the layers (and the copper sub mount) because the intersubband transition exhibits a quantum mechanical selection rule. With the copper submount or the bottom of a HHL on a table, the light is emitted with vertical polarization. In an external cavity laser kit, the chip is mounted vertically, so the polarization output is horizontal.

For ICL however the electric field is always parallel to the layer, so the emitted field is horitontally polarized for submounts or HHL and vertically polarized in external cavity laser kits.

 

All of our stock lasers have a single spatial mode. The mode is typically the Gaussian TEM00 mode. If this is a specific requirement in your application, please be certain to ask for a mode measurement as spatial modes are not automatically specifically measured.

The unipolar laser is designed around a tightly confined waveguide. For this reason, the beam diffracts strongly at the output facet and has a (full) divergence angle of about 60 degrees perpendicular to the layer and 40 degrees parallel to the layers (see figures below). A f#1 optics will typically collect about 70% of the emitted output power for a laser on submount or in a LLH housing. Be careful that the collected output power will decrease with the square of the f-number of the collection optics.

Typical beam profile  of an uncollimated QCL.
Typical beam profile
of an uncollimated QCL.

Our TO3-L and HHL-packaged QCLs are collimated with a high numerical aperture (NA = 0.85) aspherical lens to maximize collection efficiency. The beam diameter is ≤ 4 mm at the output of the package and the full-angle beam divergence at 1/e^2 is ≤ 6 mrad for HHL (higher for high power devices) and ≤ 10 mrad for TO-3. A beam picture of a typical collimated QCL emitting at a wavelength of 8 µm is displayed below, showing the good beam quality.

 Typical beam profile  of a collimated QCL.

Typical beam profile
of a collimated QCL.
Alpes Lasers SA, a Switzerland based manufacturer of infrared laser products, is committed to conducting its business in an ethical, legal, environmentally and socially responsible manner. All our activities comply with all applicable domestic and international laws and regulations, industry standards, and all other relevant statutory requirements whichever requirements impose the highest standards of conduct.
 
Our behaviour is informed by internationally recognized principles such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the UN Global Compact, the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the International Labour Organization’s fundamental conventions.
 
In particular, this document lists a series of regulations that are actively followed by Alpes Lasers in a non-exhaustive manner.

 

Intermittent CW modulation scheme

One particular interest of quantum cascade lasers is in the narrow intrinsic linewidths (down to <1kHz). The goal is to achieve a low effective linewidth, however, the driving scheme is important.

Three common driving schemes are inter-pulse modulation, intra-pulse modulation and CW modulation. They are described in more details elsewhere but each comes with their limitation:

  • short pulse schemes require either fast current drivers (in the inter-pulse scheme) or fast detectors (in the intra-pulse scheme) to avoid the chirping inherent in pulsed lasers.
  • CW modulation is more demanding on the laser itself and requires large heat dissipation.

We describe here a new scheme, dubbed Intermittent Continuous Wave (ICW) modulation, which allows one to perform spectroscopy with slow detectors and drivers while using lasers in TO-3 cans.  The TO-3 cans are less expensive than the LLH and HHL housing of true CW lasers.

 

This scheme was developed in collaboration with the Air Pollution /  Environmental Technology group of EMPA. More information details can be found in the paper published here.

 

Modulation schemes overview

 
Typical CW modulation scheme
Typical CW modulation scheme
The image on the top-left shows a typical CW modulation scheme. The driving current is modulated in a saw-tooth pattern to create a frequency modulation over a 200 us period, which is then followed by a short period below threshold and a repetition. This scheme allows for a slow frequency scanning: if the scanning range is 1 cm-1, then a detector with a 1 us time resolution will yield a spectral resolution of 0.005 cm-1. The small current excursion ensures minimal thermal effects.
 
Such CW modulation can be used with cooled lasers, for example in a HHL housing. However there are situations where the high footprint and power consumption required for running the laser in a constant-on mode are too high to be sustained.
 
The ICW scheme, shown on the top-right, diminishes the average dissipation in the laser by dropping the current to zero between pulses and keeping a longer pause between pulses to allow the cooling down of the laser. Doing this limits the overall dissipation and the laser can be used in a TO-3 housing. The thermal excursion is larger which results in a faster transient tuning.
 

Requirements

 
ICW lasers must be lasers that have the capability of running in CW mode given enough cooling power. The ICW mode can be applied to any CW laser in a LLH or HHL housing. In addition, the ICW mode can be applied to a similar chip mounted in a TO-3 housing, but in this case a pure CW mode is generally not possible.
 
 

Ramps

The tuning rate can be controlled by applying a ramp to the current shape. In this case, the first 40 us of the output is still discarded. Following that, the tuning rate can be increased or decreased by applying a current ramp to increase or decrease the thermal load on the active region of the laser. In this way, the total tuning range within a single pulse can reach up to 2 cm-1.
 
The following pictures show the typical results. Each lasers will be individually tested.
 
Current Ramp
Current Ramp
 

 

Spectral Output
Spectral Output

Parameter Dependency 

Relative Tuning
Relative Tuning
 
The overall tuning is almost entirely independent on the temperature of the submount but is dependent on duty cycle. The image on the right shows relative tuning for different temperatures and inter-pulse separation for an identical pulse length.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Absolute Tuning
Absolute Tuning

The tuning endpoints and the tuning rate are both dependent upon the duty cycle. The image to the left shows absolute tuning with respect to duty cycle. As the pulse-to-pulse separation becomes smaller, the behavior approaches the monochromatic CW result.
Click to enlarge

Hardware solutions

 
Square and sawtooth pulses can be created using programmable CW laser drivers. If you own such a driver you are welcome to use it and we will help you to find the best laser for such an application.
 

Alpes Lasers has also developed a driver fully dedicated to running lasers in the slow-chirp mode.

An application note is available outlining the performances of the driver in a specific spectroscopic application of nitric oxide detection.

Datasheets and Laser evaluation

 
Every CW laser mounted on NS mounts can be used in slow-chirp mode in a HHL or LLH housing. The datasheets shown on this website only reflects their performance in pure CW mode. If you inquire about these lasers, please precise the mode in which you intend to use them. 
 
Since the long current pulse works by heating the laser, it is safe to assume wavelengths available in CW mode will also be available in ICW mode but with the base temperature being colder by about 10°C. The exact temperature shift will be affected by the current used in the laser and the duty cycle. The range available is typically greater than 1.0 cm-1. A specific slow-chirp mode test under your conditions can be performed prior to shipping.
 
Lasers on NS mounts cannot be mounted in a TO-3 housing. Therefore for a TO-3 laser, please inquire directly by sending us an email.
 

ICW for practical applications

You can read here of an experiment for High resolution quantum cascade laser spectroscopy of the CH2OO radical performed at the National Taiwan University using the ICW technique or this ethanol measurement performed at EMPA in Dübendorf, Switzerland.