Newport's New Focus brand has introduced the GHz Nirvana High Speed Receiver, featuring automatic balancing, high bandwidth and fibre coupling. The uto-balance feature allows elimination of background noise from dynamically changing systems, including thermal drift and wavelength dependence, allowing users to achieve perfect power balance between the reference and signal beams. It also eliminates the need to balance the detectors optically, simplifying optical and electrical alignment. The user can also balance in optical and manual modes, if desired.
The auto-balancing feature and variable gain increase the receiver's flexibility and ease-of-use, and enable the user to adjust the detector instead of having to adjust components such as optics, lasers, samples, etc. used in an application. While manually balanced and auto-balanced modes can produce similar results for slow changes in split ratio, the auto-balance feature enables measurement systems that can accommodate drift over time.
The GHz Nirvana Receiver has an operating wavelength range of 900-1,650 nm and can cut the effects of laser noise by 25dB, making even very small signals easy to see. Rise time is less than 1ns and peak responsivity is 30,000 A/W.
The receiver is ideal for use in commercial systems where easy assembly and reliable performance over both time and temperature are critical. It also improves the performance of swept-source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT) using both high-speed balanced and auto-balanced detection. In this application the balanced detection allows subtraction of all common-mode noise and improves the ability to resolve low scattering features deep in the sample.