Coherent, Inc.

William P Proffitt

Thomas F Johnston, Jr

James L Hobart

Gerald H Williams

A scannable dye laser is provided with an integral wavemeter under computer control. The wavemeter has improved fine and coarse readout components. Incremental laser scans are precisely linked together to provide long, continuous frequency scans. The fine readout of the wavemeter provides a means for accurately piecing together the incremental scans.

Scannable laser with integral wavemeter

A broadband optical diode consists of a Faraday element within a magnetic field and an optically active element. The materials and dimensions of the Faraday element and the optically active element are chosen so that their polarization rotations approximately match over a broad wavelength span, with the rotation angles and the mismatch between them specified by the conditions that the forward wave insertion loss does not exceed a maximum specified value, and the differential loss between forward and backward traveling waves is not less than a minimum specified value.

Broadband optical diode for a ring laser

A tipping Brewster plate, used for fine tuning a tunable ring laser, such as a dye laser, is located close to a flat mirror comprising one of the optical elements of the ring optical resonator, so that both the incident and reflected beam from the flat mirror pass through the tipping Brewster plate. When the ring laser is tuned by tipping the Brewster plate, no lateral displacement of the ring laser beam takes place.

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

William P Proffitt