M squared lasers

M Squared had a great week at DAMOP in Quebec City this week.  Thanks to everyone that came along to our reception.  Looking forward to seeing you next year or sooner at CLEO or ICOLS next week. 

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Dr Graeme Malcolm, CEO of M Squared Lasers, recently attended the launch of the UK Fraunhofer CAP at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London with a keynote speech from the UK Government Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Dr Vincent Cable, MP.  

Centre stage was the Firefly-IR scanner, a man portable infrared scanner and imager which can produce video images of gas emissions at large stand off distances.

It turns out that Dr Cable is familiar with the part of Glasgow where M Squared is located having lived and studied in Glasgow many years ago.

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A short animation illustrating our commitment to effortless high performance lasing and extreme customer service:

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A SolsTiS ti sapphire laser is thrown from a third floor fire escape ... 

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The Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics opened in Glasgow yesterday. The ceremony was attended by our CEO, Dr. Graeme Malcolm, who gave a presentation welcoming the Fraunhofer team to Glasgow and highlighting the exciting programme of work that M Squared Lasers is already collaborating on with the Centre. 

We have already commented on the significance of the Fraunhofer's decision to locate its centre of excellence for photonics here in Scotland, the reasons for which include Glasgow's industrial heritage in shipbuilding and opto-electronics, local academic institutions of global significance such as Strathclyde University's Institute of Photonics, and perhaps most importantly Scotland's healthy stock of dynamic, growing photonics businesses such as M Squared Lasers.

Local businesses are important in the Fraunhofer model because it is collaborative and needs a commercial edge in order to be successful and sustainable. M Squared is already collaborating with Fraunhofer on a programme which has delivered more than a million pounds of revenue to the Centre and which harnesses our relationships with Scottish universities, our world class scientists, R&D and manufacturing facilities, and perhaps above all our collaborative culture and desire to explore.

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M Squared Lasers has recently succeeded in extending the wavelength range of the SolsTiS ti sapphire laser down to 670 nm. (Previously the tuning range was 700-1,000 nm). Due to it's compact size, easy tuning via netbook and hands-free functioning, the SolsTiS has become a tool of choice for quantum optics research groups around the world in recent years. A major application is atom cooling with many of our customers conducting experiments involving optical lattices of ultra cold atoms. Extending the working range down to 670 nm is significant because it makes it possible to cool and trap lithium atoms.

Why trap lithium (as opposed to, say, rubidium)? It happens that lithium atoms are particularly well suited to formation of pairs wherein the atoms have a spin characteristic which can be manipulated. This makes it possible to control spin patterns across an optical lattice, a precursor to a range of interesting experiments. 

A leading application of ultra cold lithium atoms trapped in an optical lattice is a quantum simulation. Lithium offers researchers control over spin as well as position and from this the ability to create simple quantum systems that simulate the quantum dynamics of problems that defy computer modelling because of the vast amount of memory that would be needed to cope with the very large number of variables. 

The notion of quantum simulation was suggested by Richard Feynman in a 1981 lecture. Recent work by customers of M Squared Lasers has demonstrated that ultra cold atoms trapped in optical lattices are an effective route to creating such simulations due to the extent of control that experimenters can exert over the atoms. Lasers can even be used to flip the spin of individual atoms. Recent experiments have also produced amazing images using a high resolution microscope which captures the fluorescence from atoms trapped in a single plane of an optical lattice. The image below is from an article by Professor Immanuel Bloch which appears in the March 2013 edition of Physics World and shows a typical picture of atoms trapped in the lattice. 

(An optical lattice is an atom trap generated by interfering laser beams which create a fixed polarised structure with periodic maxima and minima. Atoms are trapped and cooled in the potential minima with the resulting structure looking like a crystal lattice - often represented graphically as something like eggs in an egg box). 

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We're just back from SPIE Photonics West in San Francisco. It was a great show and the perfect occasion to launch our new event booth. 

Singing in the rain and no sign of jet lag:

The booth arrived in crates and flight cases. 

It took a couple of days to build.

Hard work behind the scenes. No business like show business!

Up and running!

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With most of our lasers exported there's no shortage of opportunities of our team to explore the world.   One of our team, Daniel Aitken, recently made a mini tour of China and South Korea and Japan. Over the course of several weeks Daniel worked alongside our local representatives visiting several customers and installing many laser systems. This kind of adventure is not unusual for our team as they cover the world. 

On this occasion Daniel was lost in translation for a while, snowbound in Seoul in a minus-twenty freezeover at the airport. Check it out:

In order to stay warm in the airport hotel, Daniel was able to practice his version of the gangnam style dance in preparation for our big Christmas Party next week. Everyone's looking forward to seeing that. 

In the end it was all white on the night: our customers had their lasers installed and Daniel is now safe and sound back at HQ. 

Oppan M Squared Style!  ... Eh, hands free laser ... op op op M Squared Style!

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Hyperspectral remote sensing involves the detection or identification of substances at a distance. For example, using laser light of various wavelengths to identify specific, dangerous toxic or explosive hydrocarbons at a safe distance. Multiple wavelengths of light can be used by a single device (such as the Firefly-IR mid-infrared tuneable laser) to scan for multiple unique absorption signatures.

Typical remote sensing applications include stand-off detection of explosives, food quality inspection, or scanning for gas leaks on oil platforms, pipelines and processing plant; any situation where hyperspectral  imaging can be used to scan for telltale "fingerprints" or spectral signatures and where distance is required for operator safety. 

M Squared Lasers provides hyperspectral remote sensing solutions to a range of organisations in various sectors including oil and gas, defence and food & drink.

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 It's only September but we're starting to think ahead to Photonics West 2013 (Feb 2-5 at Moscone Center in San Francisco - currently our booth allocation is 2517 South Hall). We're excited about our new exhibition booth which will have its first outing at the event, and also about some of the activity that's already starting to take shape. For example, we're sponsoring a THz imaging seminar at BiOS - part of SPIE Photonics West 2013,  BiOS is a global forum on the frontier of biomedical imaging, biophotonics, optical microscopy, optogenetics and, generally, the intersection of optics, photonics and molecular biology, diagnostics and therapeutics. 

 Sponsoring the event at BiOS sits well with some other research we're involved in at Strathclyde University in Scotland. Together with the University itself, the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance (SUPA) and the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance (SULSA) we have been funding work on the use of terahertz spectroscopy in bimolecular analysis.

 Terahertz radiation is part of the electromagnetic spectrum and sits between the far-infrared and the microwave bands at approximately 0.1-20 THz.  As it lies between the infrared and the microwave parts of the spectrum, terahertz shares some of their features such as microwaves' ability to pass through non-conducting materials such as masonry and clothing (but it can't pass through water or water vapour). This makes it very useful in imaging / scanning applications such as providing "eyes" for helicopter pilots landing and taking off in clouds of dust. 

It has applications in medical imaging because, while it can penetrate living tissue like an X-ray, the photon energy is much lower and so much less damaging. The work we are supporting at Strathclyde University makes use of the potential of low frequency terahertz radiation to detect intermolecular interactions including van der Waals forces and hydrogen bonding (in turn because organic molecules exhibit low frequency vibrational modes deriving from interactions among bonded atoms inside molecules). Applications investigated include analysis of DNA, amino acids and peptides. THz spectra have been obtained for complex molecules such as both double and single-stranded DNA. Clear spectra were also obtained for single amino acids but the increasing complexity of peptides masked a clear signal in the range the team investigated. 

Keep an eye on our website for the forthcoming publication of the new datasheet for the Firefly-THz, our tuneable, maintenance free, hands free, ultra compact terahertz source which is used in engineering inspection, security, and biomedical applications. 

Special thanks to T. Harwood and Dr. E. Ellis at Strathclyde Insititute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Science.

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