Places to go when it comes to building ultrafast lasers

In this short summary we are showcasing some of our suppliers. If you are building something in your lab similar to our products and need advice where get parts from, this little summary might help. 

Optical Fibre
Optical fibre is the core technology which not just fibre lasers but also the telecommunications industry relies on. Optical fibres some in many shapes and types. Just polarization maintaining types have bowtie, panda, elliptical and spun designs. Multimode, single mode and graded-index designs are often used in the telecom. Photonic bandgap or photonic crystal fibres are more used in research and specialty lasers (for instance supercontinuum generation) but they are hard to splice and handle while they cost hundreds of euros per meter. Few mode fibres are particularly interesting because they can deliver higher peak powers with low nonlinearities (SRS, SPM ..)

Lightera (https://lightera.com/)
Lightera (or previously OFS) is part of the Furukawa group and does many things in the photonics industry. Fibre splicing equipment, lasers, telecom devices and optical fibre. Did you know that Lightera has many specialty fibres in their offering? If you need something specific for your application, you better reach out because they have 1000s of different fibres for all kind of operating wavelengths.

CorActive (https://www.coractive.com/)
CorActive is located in Canada and is specialized for Ytterbium and Erbium doped active fibres. They have many core diameters, polarization maintaining, core or cladding pumped versions. They were bought in 2016 by Han's Laser but still supply high quality optical fibre for laser applications. 

Pump Lasers
Pump lasers are nowadays very widely available due to the industrial use of high power fibre lasers for cutting and welding. These lasers often come with even up to 200kW of output power and can cut through extremely thick pieces of metals. Every one of these lasers has the same (+20%) amount of pump lasers built in. A 100kW laser would need 10s of thousand pump laser emitters so they are made in large volume. 

Aerodiode (https://www.aerodiode.com/)
There are not many companies in Europe or USA which are offering high power pump lasers and Aerodiode has a very broad portfolio. 976nm wavelength locked lasers, or non-wavelength locked 808nm, 915nm or 940nm are most often used for pumping Ytterbium fibre lasers. The used wavelength simply depends on how fast we want the light absorbed in the fibre. 

Jlight (https://jlight.net.cn/en/)
Jlight is one of the many Chinese pump laser manufacturers. They have fibre coupled diode lasers, laser bars and stacks in the CW and QCW range. Many wavelengths offered just like with Aerodiode and there are many options for customization.  

Fibre Optic Components
Fibre optics has gone far beyond imagination. There are so many fibre optic components like switches, wavelength division multiplexers, isolators, amplifiers, couplers and splitters that even a centipede would have trouble counting them. Specifically for the laser technology there are most often pump combiners, pump couplers, signal splitters, bandpass filters used. 

RUIK (https://www.ruik-tech.com/)
RUIK is our number one choice when it comes to fibre optic components. Given the immense range of options when it comes to just a simple splitter, it is necessary to customize many components. RUIK can supply many components for low and high power, from 532nm to 2um wavelength. Highly recommended.

Advanced Fibre Resources (https://www.fiber-resources.com/)
AFR is an old timer in the fibre optics business which means they have grown a bit too big to keep their prices low. However, they have a very good range of components and they are our second choice when it comes to fibre components.  

Electronics
Lasers, just like many other optical and photonic devices also require electronics. The most obvious is of course laser drivers which are simply constant current power supplies with very fast turn on ad off characteristics and a lot of options like temperature control, interfaces, interlock etc. Most companies prefer to build their own electronics so they don't rely on possibly discontinuing components. 

Meerstetter Engineering (https://www.meerstetter.ch/)
Meerstetter is based in Switzerland and it's a great example for affordable and high quality laser driver electronics. Affordable products can indeed come from Swiss companies and they are a great example for this exception.

LaCoSys (https://lacosys.com/)
Laser Control Systems is based in Germany and we can certainly recommend them. Customized and application tailored electronics for laser systems. Maybe a good choice if you decide to go volume.

Mouser Electronics (https://www.mouser.com/)
When you need an LED, a connector or just a wire you need a large database of components to choose from. Of course Farnell, RS-Components, Digikey are also very similar but over they years we found that mouser has the largest number of options and in-stock items. Recommended!

Free-Space Optics
Sometimes when a laser gets so powerful that it can destroy any material in the world, including transparent materials and even air, one needs to go free space. 

AzurePhotonics (https://www.azurephotonics.com/)
We have worked and recommending Azure for our customers many years while we were working on optical system design projects. When we build a prototype or go to production, they can deliver lenses, prisms and more. 

Gitterwerk (https://gitterwerk.com/)
Gitterwerk is a number one choise when it comes to ultrashort pulse lasers. I don't know if there is any ultrafast laser manufacturer which does not use their gratings. You see, gratings are used in pulse stretchers and compressors and the length of the assembly will highly depend on the grating density. Gitterwerk can deliver very high density nanopatterned gratings which have close to 100% diffraction efficiency. 

Edmund Optics (https://www.edmundoptics.com/)
EdmundOptics has probably the largest stock optics choice in the world. When you need a lens quick, you should get one from the catalogue. Of course COTS lenses are sometimes out of stock and of course especially those which you want to use. Sometimes it takes months to get a part which is supposed to be delivered quickly but I guess this is just bad luck.

Thorlabs (https://www.thorlabs.com/)
Where Thorlabs shines is optomechanics and fibre optics components for prototyping. Expensive? Yes. But orders are always going smoothly and when it comes to a single piece for your prototype, you will likely end up eventually on their website. And of course the high price includes a pack of snacks which makes you quicker forget how much it hurts to get a screw for 20euros each. 

Mechanics 
By mechanics I of course mean pieces of metal custom milled or turned to your request. It gives your product that characteristic shape. The housing, lids, adapters, optics mounts. Every product needs some and so do we. Our approach is keeping it as simple as possible so the supplier doesn't have much trouble of making the part and our customers don't have to pay for something unnecessary. 
As we are not yet at high volume (2025), I will just list a couple useful suppliers.

HLH Prototypes (https://www.hlhprototypes.com/)
They have a bad google business review score so first impressions are not good. However, if you look closer these are just people annoyed by their aggressive marketing approach. Regarding the quality - it's first class and we have worked with HLH while we were building protypes. I get annoying marketing emails all the time. You won't believe how many different CNC and optics manufacturer companies are there is Asia. I get so much spam.. Well, you better ignore it instead of spending even time to write a review!

JLC (https://jlccnc.com/)
They do PCBs but CNC parts as well. I like a lot the approach the you can upload your files and get an instant estimate on the part. Similar to Chromos or Misumi but it works and the estimates are much lower. I guess it really depends on how much safety factor one calculates with.

With that we arrive to the end of our short summary.