Glass and fiber

Glass composition design and fabrication

• Multi-component glasses: phosphate glass, silicate glass, germanate glass, tellurite glass, etc.

• Rare-earth doped and undoped glasses

• Melting temperature - up to 1700^oC

• Environmentally controlled furnaces

• Cut, grind, and polish equipment

Preform fabrication

• Single mode rod-in-tube preforms

• Single and multi-core fiber preforms

• Double and triple cladding fiber preforms

• Micro-structured fiber preforms

• Photonic crystal fiber preforms

Fiber Drawing

• Engineered for non-silica glass

• Designed for both redraw and fiber drawing

• Engineered for rod-in-tube preforms

• Environmentally controlled

• Low contamination

Optics

• Fiber laser design and fabrication

• ASE design and fabrication

• Fiber amplifiers with extremely short latency

• Spectral linewidth and phase noise characterization

• Laser power and frequency stability characterization

• Emission spectrum and lifetime characterization

• Optical waveguide characterization

• Many well-equipped optics labs

Electronics

• Compact laser controls based on the latest DSP technology.

• User friendly graphical interfaces for all products.

• Industry standard ‘SCPI’ command language interface

• Pulse measurement system with a resolution of 125ps

• Fast development cycle

• Designed for manufacture and test

Laboratories

• Environment test lab

• Humidity environmental chamber

• Temperature environmental chamber

• Shock and vibration

• Materials characterization lab

• UV/VIS/NIR Spectrometer

• FT-IR Spectrometer

• Prism coupler

• Differential scanning calorimetry

• Differential thermal analysis

• Thermogravimetric analysis

• Thermomechanical analysis

• Gas chromatograph mass analysis

Technologists

NP Photonics has 7 PhDs in our technology and engineering teams developing new glass compositions, new fiber structures, new photonics devices, and fiber optic sensing systems and subsystems.

Arturo Chavez-Pirson, Chief Technology Officer

• Dr. Arturo Chavez-Pirson is the Director of Technology Development. Prior to joining NP Photonics in December 2000, Dr. Arturo Chavez-Pirson was a Senior Research Scientist in the Basic Research Laboratories of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) Corporation in Japan. At NTT, he directed R&D programs covering optoelectronic phenomena and devices for telecommunications applications. He was a Research Fellow at Imperial College in London U.K., and served as advisor to the Japan Research Development Corporation in Tokyo. Dr. Chavez-Pirson has over 20 years of academic and industrial experience in photonic materials and devices. He has been awarded several Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) programs. He received a B.S. in Physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Optical Sciences from the University of Arizona. He is currently an Adjunct Associate Research Professor in Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona.

Lukas Gruber, Director of Engineering

• Dr. Lukas Gruber joined NP Photonics in September 2005, as Director of Fiber Laser Engineering. Prior to joining NP, Dr. Gruber held several Engineering positions at Coherent and Spectra-Physics. At Coherent, he worked on a new high power laser platform for cw, Q-switched and ultrafast lasers. At Spectra-Physics, he led several projects for industrial high-power Q-switched lasers. Dr. Gruber earned his MS in Physics from the Technical University of Graz, Austria and completed his PhD in Physics after his research in plasma physics at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA.

Jean Michel Maillard, Production & Manufacturing Engineering Manager

• Jean Michel Maillard is one of the main Product Development Senior Engineers. He has 19 years experience in developing new optical technologies for different Industries. He was at JDS Uniphase before joining NP Photonics a strategic Project Manager for ‘the’ Blue Laser development. He came from Grenoble, France, in 2003, where he started a Company called Nanolase as Director of Engineering, focused on Microlaser Applications and also as the main Program manager for advanced research with Governmental Labs.. The Company received a few awards for its New Products introduction. Between 1987 and 1996, he has been involved into the Development of new Optical Fiber Sensors for the sensing market at Bertin, France and particularly is one of the first scientist who wrote gratings on fibers to make distributed sensors. Beside his basic optical knowledge, he has expertise in mechanics, non-linear optics, semi-conductor laser, multimode and single mode ‘bulk’ and fiber laser. He received his Master in theoretical Physics and his Engineering Degree in Optics and opto-electronics in 1987 from Ecole Superieure d’Optique in France.