Scientific-grade lasers are incredibly costly components of modern microscopes. Inexpensive laser diodes are much cheaper, often less than $100, but they have high divergence and an asymmetrical intensity profile, which makes them difficult to efficiently couple into single-mode optical fibers. Instead, they are coupled into multimode fibers, which results in the appearance of laser speckles […]
Tag: lasers
Ytterbium laser for $13,000.
One of the largest obstacles to two-photon DIY microscopy is the acquisition of a pulsed laser system, which generally hits the $100,000 range. Evan Perillo, Justin McCracken, Daniel Fernée, John Goldak, Flor Medina, David Miller, Hsin-Chih Yeh, and Andrew Dunn have a 2016 paper detailing the construction and characterization of a Ytterbium laser at 1060 […]