New Focus, part of Newport Corporation, has introduced a new series of semiconductor tapered amplifiers for high-power tunable and fixed-wavelength applications. The Vamp series is designed to accept many fibre-coupled seed sources, providing easy alignment and helping protect the chip from unintentional misalignment. The high performance design includes output isolation, over-current protection, and input seed monitoring in every amplifier to ensure stable and robust operation. These features also protect the chip from self-lasing and other hazardous operating conditions.
The new tapered amplifier series produces in excess of 1W of tunable signal-frequency radiation when seeded with an appropriate source, such as New Focus’ Vortex II or Velocity precision tunable lasers. The Vamp can also operate with many homemade seed sources, making it a convenient, user-friendly solution for quality measurements in the laboratory. The New Focus engineering team has implemented a special power-locking loop that reduces the amplitude noise and drift. The power output remains stable and extremely quiet over the entire operating temperature range, which results in higher quality data in shorter amounts of time.
The Vamp offers extremely high ASE rejection to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, making it suitable for applications in atomic cooling, spectroscopy, and for creating Bose-Einstein condensates.