The newest Sapphire laser from Coherent, (Santa Clara, CA) is a small-footprint OEM laser delivering 50mW (CW) of output power at 488nm
The Sapphire 50mW laser is primarily intended for biomedical instrumentation, such as flow cytometry, drug discovery, genetic screening and confocal microscopy.
This power level will deliver increased sensitivity, leading to faster throughput and/or higher signal-to-noise for these applications, without increasing the instrument size or operating budget.
The Sapphire 50mW is based on the same reliable, efficient, optically pumped semiconductor laser technology as its 10mW and 20mW versions, and also shares their same form factor, power requirements and beam characteristics.
This commonality allows easy implementation in next-generation instruments based on the Sapphire industrial standard without requiring redesign.
These shared characteristics also permit system builders to choose power levels from 10 to 50mW, thus leveraging a single laser engine platform.
Until the advent of the Sapphire laser platform, applications for 488nm output had to rely on power-hungry, air-cooled argon lasers.
The all-solid-state Sapphire provides the advantages of smaller size, greater electrical efficiency, lower heat dissipation and substantially longer lifetime.
The result is a dramatic reduction in cost of ownership over argon laser technology, making Sapphire the laser of choice (and even a retrofit option) for low- and medium-power applications in bioinstrumentation and semiconductor inspection.
