BOA Compressor Selected as 2009 Prism Award Winner

Swamp Optics' BOA Compressor has been selected as a WINNER for SPIE's Prism Award honoring the Most Innovative Products in Optics in 2009.

The team from Swamp Optics accepted the award at SPIE Photonics West 2010 show in San Francisco. The Prism award continues the tradition of developing award winning products for the photonics industry.

The innovative BOA Compressor is a simple, elegant, compact and inexpensive pulse compressor.

The BOA (Bother-free Optimized Arrangement) uses only one prism, a roof mirror and a precisely manufactured corner-cube to reflect the beam back to the prism precisely parallel with the beam entering it. This automatically aligned arrangement avoids all of the problematic beam distortions of two- and four-prism designs (including angular dispersion, spatial chirp, and pulse-front tilt).

Only the corner-cube need be moved to tune the group-delay dispersion (GDD) over a wide range of values. Only the single prism angle need be rotated when the input wavelength changes. Also, because the prism-corner-cube distance is tuned (and not the prism insertion as in conventional compressors), the BOA Compressor can accommodate pulses with large, as well as small, bandwidths.

Want to know more? Check out the BOA Compressor Overview to learn more about this simple, elegant, compact and inexpensive pulse compressor. For even more detail, including a description of the BOA Compressor's patented inner workings and the science behind the pulse compressor's capabilities, see the Pulse Compression Tutorial.

Swamp Optics' FROGs and GRENOUILLEs still tell you everything you could possibly want to know about an ultrashort laser pulse!!

Swamp Optics features the powerful new class of Frequency-Resolved Optical Gating (FROG) techniques. Our FROG and GRENOUILLE (pronounced gra-'new-ee) devices quickly and accurately measure the complete pulse intensity and phase vs. time and frequency, not just the autocorrelation. And, unlike autocorrelation, they make no assumptions about the pulse shape.

What's more, our devices also measure the pulse spatio-temporal distortions, spatial chirp and pulse-front tilt. And the beam spatial profile and absolute wavelength, too. The result is the most complete characterization of an ultrashort laser pulse available!

Best of all, Swamp Optics' devices require no alignment—ever. Even aligning your beam into the device for the first time is a mere ten-minute experience. Weighing as little as a kg, they're also elegant and compact—some almost fit in your pocket! And, by the way, they're inexpensive, too.

Far better than any autocorrelation, GRENOUILLE visually shows you the pulse intensity and color (instantaneous frequency) vs. time (t) and transverse position (x), beautifully revealing the complete pulse evolution and any spatio-temporal distortions that may be present. Is the pulse chirped in time? Is it chirped in space? Or does it have pulse-front tilt?

The pulse shown above has all of these distortions, and, while a 2D autocorrelation can barely even show the pulse length, GRENOUILLE and the QuickFrog software nicely display all of these effects in 3D and color!