Electro Optical Components, Inc. Ultra-Fast Pockels Cell (UPC)

For most normal applications such as Q-switching and laser beam modulation, the standard EM500 and EM500M ranges of longitudinal Pockels cells are very adequate. Rise times achievable with these devices can be easily obtained in the range of 500ps and upward with suitable electrical drive waveforms. In fact in most systems, the rise time of the electrical pulse generator into the load capacitance of the cell is the dominant factor and typical rise times are thus of the order of 3 to 5ns. For some applications, however, the shortest possible rise times are required and this is where our UPC design excels. For pulse picking (selecting one or more adjacent pulses from a high repetition rate train of pulses, especially from a mode locked laser), the rise time requirements are usually based on generating a time gate of a few ns duration, so ~ns rise and fall times are adequate. However, with mode-locked sources often delivering pulse trains of greater than 100MHz repetition frequency shorter time windows are increasingly becoming more common.