Thorlabs SL10 series MEMS-VCSEL Swept-Wavelength Laser Sources

Thorlabs has released the SL10 series of its MEMS-VCSEL Swept-Wavelength Laser Sources. The series, centred at 1060 nm, complements the SL13 series at 1300 nm and is available with four different sweep rates ranging from 60 to 400 kHz. Based on a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) tunable vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL), the light sources feature a high coherence length of over 100 mm and include an active power control that maintains constant output power over the lifetime of the laser.

All drive electronics and trigger signals needed to seamlessly integrate the laser sources into custom swept-source OCT systems are provided. An output digital ‘k-clock’ signal generated by the integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) and drive electronics can be used as a data acquisition sampling clock, with no further resampling in k-space required. The k-clock signal delay and maximum output power of the laser can be user adjusted up to ±8 ns and ±5%, respectively.

The MEMS-VCSEL lasers are suitable for a variety of applications in metrology, sensing, spectroscopy and imaging. For example, in optical coherence tomography (OCT), the SL10 series enables high imaging speed and sensitivity of both the anterior and posterior part of the eye. All lasers are also available with an integrated matched balanced photodetector.