Hello everybody

My name is avi schiff and i am the technical director at arsuf lasers.

In this video I would like to share with you some experience we gained in manufacturing laser rods for the defense market and laser range finding applications in general.

The best suitable material for eye safe lrf 1.54 micron is erbium glass that is a phosphate sensitive to heat and air affecting its coating results.

One of the jobs that boosted our knowledge and experience was making a rod of 1mm diameter meeting laser damage spec above 25j/cm2 as you can see in the picture.

At that time our customer was experiencing expensive coating damage failures paralyzing his production line occasionally.

We tried to fix this coating issue with some well known coaters however their LIDT achievements   were by far below our target spec. 

The traditional approach was grinding then stacking the rods in a kind of lost resin to hold them while polishing as seen in the picture.

Then we found that this process is degrading the final coating strength, so we tried a new approach: polish and coat the surfaces of the material and then  core the rods.

Even though we were using a precision grade core the yield was not good enough.

Our conclusion was that we have to explore the failures and linkage between erbium glass and fabrication methods, identify the causes and create a process with tooling that will rectify these problems.

This process from that time was manufacturing thousands of these tiny rods with negligible number of rejects.

I want to finalise with a hidden spec/feature  of life expectancy ,here in this picture you can see our coating failing after operating the rod for a few million shots.

Anyone who needs to consult with us is welcome.

Thank you