This page serves as a hub for information on the MEC LPL seed laser and pulse shaping. This is a living document.
Overview
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- Continuous-wave (CW) output from NP Photonics "The Rock" is coupled by fiber to a lithium niobate-based electro-optic modulator (EOM)
- EOM provides amplitude shaping to slice up the CW input into seed pulses at 10Hz repetition rate; seed pulses can be up to 35ns in duration and require various shapes in order to provide the types of pulse needed on-target
- Pulse shape/duration is defined by the arbitrary waveform generator (AWG), which can define 140 equally-spaced amplitude heights over a 35ns window (→ spacing of 250ps/pixel); heights are chosen to pre-compensate for the amplitude distortion arising due to gain saturation effects throughout the rest of the system
Further details
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| title | Seed Laser – NP Photonics "The Rock" |
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Product info here (rack-mounted version here) Brain dump: - We have two of these, with the rack-mounted version serving as back-up; located in rack 64B; the back-up has been tested for functionality previously, so it should be plug and play
- These can be wavelength tuned, but it's a little finnicky and laggy (especially on the rack-mounted version, which is tuned using a pot on the front of the unit), so it's best not to touch them; in the ancient past, these units got shuffled around with the factory supposedly in order to get the tuning range set appropriately for the system it would be seeding
- There is a way to read out information from these units from the back panel, but there is no way to actually control these units from the back panel – no hope for writing an IOC
- Only plugs in the back should be power and interlock
- System should show temp stable and second mode suppressed or else there will be major performance/stability issues; depending on how long it's been off or how unstable the environment is, this may be fine right away or it may take ~30-60min
- Front display should show ~135-140mW and 1053.045nm when running
- Past experimenting didn't show any effect of using ACC vs. APC mode nor RIN suppression on vs. off
Representative/historical pictures:  Image Added Image Added
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| title | Electro-optic modulator (EOM) – iXBlue NIR-MX-LN-10 (S/N 8442-27) |
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Product info here
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| title | Arbitrary Waveform Generator (AWG) – Highland Technologies T400B |
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Technical manual here
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| title | Modulator Bias Controller (MBC) -- iXBlue MBC-DG-LAB |
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Product info here
User manual here
Interface manual here
Software here
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| title | Polarization-maintaining (PM) Fiber -- Thorlabs |
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