Yokogawa Meters & Instruments Corporation has announced that it has developed the AQ6376 optical spectrum analyzer. The AQ6376 has a wide dynamic range and can perform precise, high resolution measurements of the optical spectrum of laser light in the 1.5–3.4 μm wavelength range. The AQ6376 is a bench-top analyzer that uses dispersive spectroscopy*1 and supports the 3-μm band, an industry first.

An optical spectrum analyzer is a measuring instrument that resolves the wavelength components of optical devices such as semiconductor lasers and fiber lasers in order to assess their properties. The AQ6376 will help to improve the efficiency of 3-μm optical devices and accelerate their adoption in fields such as environmental measurement and medicine, where they already are a topic of considerable interest.

Industry-leading measuring range

The AQ6376 has a dynamic range of 80 dB and a close-in dynamic range*3 of 55 dB, which are 10,000 times and 300 times greater, respectively, than what is possible when using an interferometer-type instrument in the 3-μm band. No other instrument on offer in the market has this range,*4 and this is sufficient for the performance of side mode measurements with a semiconductor laser.

Industry’s highest wavelength resolution

The AQ6376 has an industry-best wavelength resolution of 100 pm, three times that of an interferometer-type measuring instrument in the 3-μm band.*5
Accurate measurement of the optical spectrum of light

The AQ6376 comes with two additional enhancements. One is a function that purges water vapor trapped in a spectroscope that can suppress the absorption of light with a certain wavelength. The other is a function that reduces the effect of high-order diffracted light whose wavelengths are 2–3 times that of incident light, a problem which all spectroscopes have due to their design principle.

Yokogawa
yokogawa.com