a-BBO Crystal alpha -Barium Borate

The Yttrium Orthovanadate (YVO4) is a positive uniaxial crystal grown with Czochralski method. It has good temperature stability and physical and mechanical properties. It is ideal for optical polarizing components because of its wide transparency range and large birefringence. It is an excellent synthetic substitute for Calcite (CaCO3) and Rutile (TiO2) crystals in many applications including fiber optic isolators and circulators, interleavers, beam displacers and other polarizing optics.

Prisms are transparent optical devices which refract or reflect light. They have manifold applications in laser technology.

Invented by H.W. Dove, Dove Prisms are also known Reversion prisms.  When the prism is rotated about its length axis, the image viewed through the prism rotates at twice the prism rotation rate.  This is an unusual and sometimes useful property for special applications. Entry and exit faces are anti-reflection coated.

Double Concave Lenses are used in beam expansion, image reduction, or light projection applications. These lenses are also ideal for expanding the focal length of an optical system. Double Concave Lenses, which have two concave surfaces, are Optical Lenses with negative focal lengths. HG OPTRONICS offers Double Concave lenses with a variety of coating options.

Nd:YVO4 (Neodymium Doped Yttrium Orthovanadate) crystals is one of the most promising commercially available diode pumped solid state laser materials, especially, for low to middle power density. This is mainly for its higher absorption and emission features than Nd:YAG crystal. Pumped by laser diodes, Nd:YVO4 crystal has been incorporated with high NLO coefficient crystals ( LBO, BBO, or KTP) to frequency-shift the output from the near infrared to green, blue, or even UV. This incorporation to construct all solid state lasers is an ideal laser tool that can cover the most widespread applications of lasers, including machining, material processing, spectroscopy, wafer inspection, light displays, medical diagnostics, laser printing, and data storage, etc. It has been shown that Nd:YVO4 based diode pumped solid state lasers are rapidly occupying the markets traditionally dominated by water-cooled ion lasers and lamp-pumped lasers, especially when compact design and single-longitudinal-mode outputs are required.

Nd:GdVO4, is a promising material for diode pumped lasers. Similar to the more well-known Nd:YVO4 crystal, Nd:GdVO4 crystal also exhibits high gain, low threshold, and high absorption coefficients at pumping wavelengths. Nd:GdVO4 has the additional advantage over Nd:YVO4 of a much higher thermal conductivity. For CW lasing at 1.06 um and 1.34 um and intracavity doubling with KTP and LBO, the gadolinium vanadate have produced a higher slope efficiency or optical conversion than Nd:YVO4.

Optical domes are lenses with two concentric spherical surfaces. Sometimes they are being referred to as bent plan parallel plates. Consequently it is customary to define parallelism between two surfaces as the maximum thickness variation between the two surfaces.

Fused silica window, with low thermal expansion,  providing stability and resistance to thermal shock over large temperature excursions, wide thermal operating range and high laser damage threshold, is a better choice for transmission from UV to IR.