I'm sure everybody has seen the news about the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics, which was won by Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne — who are recognized "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".

A Coherent Mephisto laser played a critical and central role in the effort-- which stands as an important confirmation of certain aspects of Einstein’s General Relativity.

Mephisto lasers offer higher stability and lower output noise than any other commercial laser, which made them the choice to act as the first stage oscillator in the world’s major gravity wave detection (GWD) programs.  This includes the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) that made this first observation by comparing synchronous data (recorded on September 14, 2015) at two sites in the United States - Livingston, LA, and Hanford, WA.

Mephisto lasers are based on Non-Planar Ring Oscillator (NPRO) technology.  Here, the entire intracavity beam path is contained within a small neodymium-doped gain crystal which is impervious to contamination, inherently simple to stabilize, and which lends itself to thermal and piezoelectric fine frequency tuning.  External access to these tuning inputs was critical to the stabilization schemes employed at LIGO.

 In honor of this momentous achievement, and our (not insignificant) role, Coherent has committed to exclusive sponsorship of Nature's Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 page, which gives open access to normally subscription-only articles.

You can check it out at: https://www.nature.com/collections/gjypqfycnn

LIGO and Coherent Laser

There’s been lots of attention generated in scientific community and in general public by this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. And it doesn’t stop here – just today gravitational waves community announced the observation of two neutron stars collision “seen” by using both gravitational and electromagnetic waves – and that’s a start of “multi-language” astronomy right here.

I recommend checking it out:  https://www.nature.com/collections/gjypqfycnn

https://www.coherent.com/lasers/main/diode-pumped-solid-state-lasers/continuous-wave-cw/mephisto-lasers

http://www.nufern.com/pam/fiber_amplifiers/family/id/14/recnum/0/

There’s never been a better time to talk about Mephisto lasers with your customers!

To help you with marketing material, here are some updates:

• Updated Mephisto product line customer presentation is attached.
• Brand new whitepaper “High stability laser source for cold atoms applications” was just published on our website (link above, also attached). It talks about applications for Mephisto MOPA, namely the trapping and cooling of cold atoms, optical dipole traps, optical lattices and how Mephisto MOPA fits into this. Hopefully this will help making customers’ decisions easier.
• Along with the above whitepapers, a new customer ready presentation specifically for Mephisto MOPA is attached. It is aimed for the customers working with various experiments in quantum physics.