Quantum Cascade Lasers
Pranalytica is the premier manufacturer of Quantum Cascade Lasers (QCLs) and QCL systems for industrial and defense markets. Having unmatched performance in the entire 4µm to 12µm spectral region covered by QCLs, Pranalytica's lasers further existing applications and enable new ones in fields as diverse as spectroscopy, free space optical communications, directed infrared countermeasures and other security areas.

Pranalytica is a vertically integrated QCL company, controlling the entire chain of laser system manufacturing starting from the fundamental laser design to laser fabrication and system integration. The vertical structure of the company allows tailoring laser system characteristics to the most restrictive customer specifications.

For most applications, optical power and efficiency are the main two figures of merit. Pranalytica uses its unique proprietary QCL designs that specifically target high power, high efficiency operation. The laser designs were developed under a $10 million DARPA program that was fully dedicated to QCL performance improvement. Pranalytica also uses its proprietary packaging and thermal management solutions to fully extract the available device performance and to provide well characterized and reliable high power products that can be easily integrated into real world systems.

The company now offers an industry leading family of high power, high efficiency singly-emitter products, with CW optical power levels exceeding 2W and 3W at 4.0µm and 4.6µm, respectively, and over 1W in the LWIR spectral region. Several single-emitters can be spectrally combined in Multilux platform to cover multiple spectral bands with total optical power of up to 20W. Optimization of SWaP characteristics is of a critical importance for a number of applications that include infrared beacons and target designators. To address these applications, Pranalytica has recently introduced to the market unique ultra-small high power QCW lasers with a hermitic butterfly package measuring less than 2cm3 and delivering over 1.5W at 4.0µm and over 2.5W at 4.6µm in a collimated output beam.

For spectroscopy applications Pranalytica offers widely tunable systems. Omnilux platform incorporates four external cavity lasers covering 6-10µm with more than 100mW of average power in the entire spectral region. A single-emitter version of the system is currently being developed.

REFERENCES

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[2] Jérôme Faist, Federico Capasso, Carlo Sirtori, Deborah L. Sivco, James N. Baillargeon, Albert L. Hutchinson, Sung-Nee G. Chu, and Alfred Y. Cho, "High power mid-infrared (~ 5 µm) quantum cascade lasers operating above room temperature", Appl. Phys. Lett. 68, 3680 (1996).

[3] Mattias Beck, Daniel Hofstetter, Thierry Aellen, Jérôme Faist, Ursula Oesterle, Marc Ilegems, Emilio Gini, and Hans Melchior, "Continuous-wave operation of a mid-infrared semiconductor laser at room-temperature", Science 295, 301 (2002).

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[6] Jérome Faist, Claire Gmachl, Federico Capasso, Carlo Sirtori, Deborah L. Sivco, James N. Baillargeon, and Alfred Y. Cho, "Distributed feedback quantum cascade lasers", Appl. Phys. Lett. 70, 2670 (1997).

[7] R. Maulini, M. Beck, J. Faist, and E. Gini, "Broadband tuning of external cavity bound-to-continuum quantum-cascade lasers", Appl. Phys. Lett. 84, 1659 (2004).

[8] Michael Pushkarsky, Alexei Tsekoun, Ilya G. Dunayevskiy, Rowel Go and C. Kumar N. Patel, "Sub-parts-per-billion level detection of NO2 using room temperature quantum-cascade lasers", Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103, 10846 (2006).

[9] Alexei Tsekoun, Rowel Go, Michael Pushkarsky, Manijeh Razeghi and C. Kumar N. Patel, "Improved performance of quantum cascade lasers through a scalable, manufacturable epitaxial-side-down mounting process", Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103, 4831 (2006).

[10] Michael B. Pushkarsky, Ilya G. Dunayevskiy, Manu Prasanna, Alexei G. Tsekoun, Rowel Go, and C. Kumar N. Patel, "High-sensitivity detection of TNT", Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103, 19630 (2006).

[11] I. Dunayevskiy, A. Tsekoun, M. Prasanna, R. Go, and C. K. N. Patel, "High-sensitivity detection of triacetone triperoxide (TATP) and its precursor acetone", Appl. Opt. 46, 6397 (2007).

[12] A. Mukherjee, I. Dunayevskiy, M. Prasanna, R. Go, A. Tsekoun, X. Wang, J. Fan, and C. K. N. Patel, "Sub-parts-per-billion level detection of dimethyl methyl phosphonate (DMMP) by quantum cascade laser photoacoustic spectroscopy", Appl. Opt. 47, 1543 (2008).