Innovative MIR LASER-, LED- and PD-cascade technologies for sensing

The growing demand for monitoring of specific molecules in environmental, health, and security applications has created a need for inexpensive and power-efficient light sources. In particular, the mid-infrared (MIR) wavelength ranges from 3 µm to 6 μm is of high interest for gas-sensing. Many trace gases ubiquitous to industrial sites have their strongest absorption bands in this region, e.g. carbon dioxide, nitric oxide, water, and various important hydrocarbons. They show absorption strengths that are several orders of magnitude higher than those in other spectral areas.

Aiming at providing reliable broadband and cost-effective alternatives to standard optical gas analysis, nanoplus has developed light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in the MIR. The novel substrate-side-emitting devices rely on the innovative nanoplus technology for distributed feedback (DFB) interband cascade lasers (ICL) and are available at customized wavelengths between 2800 nm and 6500 nm. They display higher wall-plug efficiencies and maximum output powers than previous MIR LEDs, operating in continuous-wave (cw) at room temperature.

nanoplus has specialized in designing DFB lasersfor high-precision gassensing in industry and research. Based on a ridge waveguide structure, which is independent of the material system, nanoplus designs CW DFB lasers at any wavelength between 760 nm and 14 µm. The nanoplus flagship product is a DFB ICL with target wavelengths from 2800 nm to 6500 nm and an extremely narrow linewidth of below 3 MHz. At top-rated wavelengths, the laser shows output powers above 15 mW and is hence perfectly suitable for highly sensitive gas detection. In this talk we will present various applications which utilize DFB ICLs or MIR LEDs and give a general overview of this technology including latest results from interband cascade photodiodes (PD) and LED-arrays in the MIR or up to 10 µm.