Resources

View our laboratory facilities with Virtual Tours of both of our Optics Labs.

The Ultrafast Optics and Fiber Communications Laboratory occupies approximately a 1000 square foot area and is equipped with 242 square feet of optical table space.  The laboratory houses various laser, fiber optic, and electronic diagnostic equipment.  Continuous-wave lasers include a large frame argon-ion laser, 5-W and 10-W frequency-doubles diode-pumped solid-state lasers, and 1.5-um tunable lasers.  Ultrashort pulse lasers include home-built erbium-doped fiber lasers generating sub-100-fsec pulses around 1.55-1.6 um and a Spectra Physics femtosecond titanium:sapphire laser and optical parametric oscillator (OPO) systems.  The OPO can produce high power, wavelength tunable, ultrashort (femtosecond) pulses at both the 1.5 and 1.3 um optical communication bands.  In addition to laser resources, the laboratory is also equipped with fiber optic equipment (two optical spectrum analyzers and an optical fiber fusion splicer) and components, components for programmable optical pulse shaping, a liquid helium cryostat configured for optical studies, and optical multichannel analyzer, a home-built photocurrent excitation spectroscopy setup, and a variety of electronic instrumentation, including a 3 Gbit/s bit error rate test set, a 50 GHz sampling oscilloscope, and a 50 GHz RF spectrum analyzer.