Abstract
The development and implementation of continuous-wave (CW) or pulsed lasers has become essential in all areas of science and engineering. In the case of pulsed lasers, their emission period is commonly set up by the length of the laser cavity, which implies that it is necessary to replace the whole laser or modify the cavity to change the repetition rate. On the other hand, microcontrollers, capable of performing specific tasks saving size, cost and power consumption, have proven to be a powerful tool for various applications. To the best of our knowledge, we present a novel pulsed laser based on a very low-cost commercial microcontroller and a continuous-wave laser diode, where the pulse width and period are adjustable through a graphical user interface (GUI); besides, a new temporal asynchronous regime consisting of periodic packets of multiple pulses is produced. Pulses from 8 to 60 ms duration and with periods from 0.25 to 5 s are presented. These long optical pulses can be useful in certain applications where conventional pulses cannot be used due to their inadequate pulse width or period or intensity, such as simulating the neuronal activity of the brain or the development of neuromorphic hardware, where the response times are in the order of ms.
Highlights
Since its creation in 1960, the laser has become a watershed due to its wide range of applications in industry, science and medicine, among others [1,2]
The microcontroller-based pulsed laser reproduces the behavior of a mode-locked laser as a first outcome: periodic pulses, which is a synchronous emission of well-defined, identical and equidistant pulses
To the best of our knowledge, we present the first synchronous/asynchronous microcontroller-based pulsed laser: a very low-cost system capable of generating long square optical pulses displaying as the first stage a standard pulsed laser behavior
Summary
Since its creation in 1960, the laser has become a watershed due to its wide range of applications in industry, science and medicine, among others [1,2]. One more modern technique is Q-switching, which generates pulses through the modulation of losses in the cavity [5,6]. Another technique, mode locking, the most important technique for obtaining short and ultrashort pulses, produces pulsing when the phases of the cavity modes are locked together, summing their amplitudes [7,8,9,10] so as to generate one pulse per round trip in the cavity; the period (T) corresponds to the laser cavity length [9,11]
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