Awards

BOA

Awards and Recognition

Swamp Optics has won a number of awards, including R&D Magazine's R&D 100 Award (for one of the top 100 inventions of the year worldwide, across all fields), the Photonics Spectra Magazine's Circle of Excellence Award, and an SPIE Prism Award. Swamp Optics' founder, Prof. Rick Trebino, has also won a number of awards for inventing the devices that Swamp Optics sells, including the SPIE's Edgerton Prize.

Based on his inventions, many of which have formed the basis of Swamp Optics, Prof. Trebino has also been elected to Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the Society of Photo-Instrumentation Engineers. And he was the IEEE LEOS Distinguished Lecturer for two consecutive years.

News Stories

Swamp Optics' BOA Compressor won an SPIE Prism Award.

The SPIE Prism awards honor the most innovative products in optics. team from Swamp Optics accepted the award at SPIE Photonics West 2010 show in San Francisco. The Prism award continues Swamp Optics' tradition of developing award-winning, innovative products for the photonics industry.

The BOA Compressor is a simple, elegant, compact, alignment-free, and inexpensive pulse compressor.

The BOA (Bother-free Optimized Arrangement) uses only one prism, a roof mirror and a precisely manufactured corner-cube to reflect the beam back to the prism precisely parallel with the beam entering it. This automatically aligned arrangement avoids all of the problematic beam distortions of two- and four-prism designs (including angular dispersion, spatial chirp, and pulse-front tilt).

Only the corner-cube need be moved to tune the group-delay dispersion (GDD) over a wide range of values. Only the single prism angle need be rotated when the input wavelength changes. Also, because the prism-corner-cube distance is tuned (and not the prism insertion as in conventional compressors), the BOA Compressor can accommodate pulses with large, as well as small, bandwidths.

Want to know more? Check out the BOA Compressor Overview to learn more about this simple, elegant, compact and inexpensive pulse compressor. For even more detail, including a description of the BOA Compressor's patented inner workings and the science behind the pulse compressor's capabilities, see the Pulse Compression Tutorial.

Swamp Optics' GRENOUILLE won an R&D 100 Award.

Atlanta, July 11, 2003 — Swamp Optics, LLC., a producer of compact and powerful devices for characterizing ultrashort laser pulses, announced today that its GRENOUILLE product has been recognized with an R&D 100 award as one of the top 100 technical innovations of the year.

Sponsored by R&D Magazine since the 1960s, R&D 100 Awards honor technologically significant products and are widely recognized as a mark of excellence across scientific, technological, and academic communities. Past R&D 100 award winners include the photo flash cube (1965), the fax machine (1975), the Kodak Photo CD (1991), and HDTV (1998).

"We are honored by this award and are excited to see GRENOUILLE among a long list of highly significant products and inventions," says Rick Trebino, founder and director of Swamp Optics. "It recognizes the solid technological and scientific innovations that make GRENOUILLE a uniquely powerful and flexible ultrashort laser pulse characterization tool."

Ultrashort laser pulses-pulses with durations of about 10 picoseconds or less-have applications in many areas, including telecommunications, electronics, biology, and chemistry. However, the pulse intensity and phase vs. time have always been difficult to measure, and for many years laser users have had to settle for only the pulse "intensity autocorrelation," at best a rough measure of the pulse intensity with no phase information. Short pulses are often also plagued with distortions that can severely distort data in any experiment, including "spatial chirp," in which pulse color varies transversely across the beam, and "pulse-front tilt," in which pulse intensity contours are tilted with respect to propagation direction. Until GRENOUILLE, a comprehensive pulse measurement that returned this kind of information was difficult, if not impossible, to obtain.

Using GRENOUILLE, measuring these and other important pulse characteristics (such as the beam spatial profile), is not only feasible and accurate, but also very simple. Its ingenious, streamlined design employs only a few simple optical elements and completely eliminates the intricate and time-consuming alignment procedure required by other pulse measurement techniques. Also more sensitive than other approaches, GRENOUILLE's operating range (~ 700 to 1100 nm) nicely matches that of most ultrafast Ti:Sapphire lasers and amplifiers, making it ideal for most everyday diagnostics as well as many more exotic applications.

GRENOUILLE is based on the Frequency-Resolved Optical Gating (FROG) pulse measurement method pioneered by Rick Trebino and coworkers in the 1990s. FROG is a well-established technique for accurately determining critical pulse information, including the time-dependent (or, equivalently, frequency-dependent) intensity and phase of an ultrashort laser pulse. The subject of five patents, FROG is rigorous, general, and accurate, and is a widely used technique with many applications.