Pushing the Limits of Femtosecond Lasers

Interview conducted by Alina Shrourou, B.Sc. (Editor)Apr 17 2019

In this interview conducted at Photonics West 2019, Florian Emaury outlines the importance of reliability in the femtosecond laser technology developed by Menhir Photonics.

What are the current limitations associated with femtosecond lasers?

Reliability is a significant problem and acts as a key issue of bringing this technology into the industrial market. This is why we have put a of lot of effort into ensuring from the beginning that the laser concept and technology have been pushed for ultimate reliability.

How can this be overcome with the MENHIR-1550?

To improve reliability, we have push to the laser concept design to its limits to ensure very high insensitivity to environmental changes. We have also tested the product on vibration tables and carried out long term testing. We are very happy about it and a lot of our customers are extremely surprised about the quality that we are already reaching for use outside the lab.

Please outline the technology behind your product.

We are currently patenting the technology, so unfortunately we cannot go into too much detail here. What we can say is that it is based on a modelocked laser, which is technology that allows us to have extremely robust performance and low-noise performances. We have a fiber output which is key for our customers to easily integrate our products into their system. It is all based on mature technology which we have pushed to its limit in terms of reliability and robustness.

What applications and industries are the MENHIR-1550 suitable for?

Where we see ourselves in the industry, is in a place to provide pertinent tools based on the laser which enables better electronics functions.

With our product, you can create super signals for electronics or for microwave generation based on ultrafast lasers. That is why we want to make this laser as robust and easy to produce as possible, so that we can reduce the cost and ensure reliability to integrate this system into the industrial system.

For example with oscilloscopes, this laser can convert analog signal into digital signal really fast, speeding up the process.

There are also some applications outside the lab that our customers are involved with, for example radars, telecommunications and metrology.

About Florian Emaury

Florian Emaury is the CEO and co-founder of Menhir Photonics, a swiss company focusing on manufacturing ultrafast lasers for applications bringing the field of photonics and electronics. After graduating in 2010 from the IOGS in Paris (MSc in Photonics/Physics), his career started with engineer experiences in Fianium (UK) and Coherent (CA, USA) before joining ETH Zürich to obtain a PhD in Physics in 2015 with Prof. Ursula Keller.

Since then Florian is devoting to evaluate business opportunities of femtosecond lasers. Since May 2018, Florian is fully involved in Menhir Photonics to develop the applications enabled by our laser and bring real reliable ultrafast lasers to our users.