It is reported that after 7 years of research and development, Radium Measurement Technology Co., Ltd. has successfully researched Kevar glass assembled He Ne laser for the first time in China, and has been mass produced. This achievement ended the 50 year history of glass blown He Ne lasers in China, and strongly promoted the development of high-end laser instruments in China.
Zhang Shulian, a professor of Tsinghua University and consultant of Radium Measurement Technology Company, said that the He Ne laser is one of the gas lasers, and is the first type of gas lasers developed. He Ne laser is a kind of laser with neutral atomic gases He and Ne as working materials, composed of discharge tube and optical resonator, which can output continuous laser. The He Ne laser operates in the visible and infrared frequency band, and can output 5435nm green light, 632.8nm red light and 1.15 infrared light μ M and 3.39 μ M and other wavelengths. Among them, the red wavelength 632.8nm has unique quality in the He Ne laser family and is the most widely used. The 632.8nm He Ne laser beam has high quality, the light intensity on the cross section of the beam is very close to the perfect Gaussian distribution, the divergence angle is very small, and the spot diameter remains several millimeters after 100 meters of propagation; The output power is stable and the noise is very low; There is a natural frequency (wavelength) stability point, and the wavelength stability can be very high, which can achieve 632.8nm drift of only one million or even one billionth of an hour; Low cost, high reliability, good consistency, strong interchangeability, etc.
Zhang Shulian pointed out that the He Ne laser is widely used in instruments and precision measurement, which is irreplaceable. Single frequency interferometer, dual frequency interferometer, surface interferometer, vibrometer, ellipsometer, laser gyroscope, etc. at home and abroad all use helium neon laser as the light source. These instruments guarantee the accuracy of precision machine tools, lithography machines, aviation, aerospace, mechanical and optical processing, film technology and other fields. These industries in China are accelerating their high-end development, and the market demand for related instruments will continue to grow, which will drive China's demand for Kevar glass assembled He Ne lasers to expand.
According to the Report on Deep Market Research and Investment Strategy Suggestions for the Helium Neon Laser Industry from 2022 to 2026 released by the New Thinking Industry Research Center, in 2021, the global Helium Neon laser market will be about 74 million yuan; It is estimated that the global He Ne laser market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of about 4.2% from 2021-2026, and the market size will reach about 91 million yuan by 2026. In the global market, helium neon laser manufacturers mainly include Lumentum Operations in the United States, Melles Griot in the United States (acquired by Pacific Lasertec), Thorlabs in the United States, Exceltas Technologies in the United States, Lasos in Germany, Phywe in Germany, and Neoark in Japan.
Zhang Shulian said that over the years, China has relied on glass blowing technology to produce helium neon lasers (tubes). The consistency between lasers is poor and the stability is poor, which cannot meet the application requirements of various laser instruments. In the past few decades, although there have also been researches on Kevar glass assembled (non blowing) He Ne lasers in China, they did not persist. They also introduced a foreign (assembly) production line. After several years of operation, they were forced to stop production because they did not have their own supply chain for components and processes. The He Ne lasers equipped with laser instruments and meters are all purchased from abroad, because they are easy to frequency jump or can not produce dual frequency oscillation, so the elimination rate is very high.
The Kevar glass assembled He Ne laser independently developed by Laser Measurement Technology is replaced by a batch of failed lasers that have been used in dual frequency laser interferometer and lithography machine. When used as a dual frequency laser, the laser power can reach more than 1.3mW, and the laser frequency difference can be selected as 3MHz, 7MHz, 10MHz, 20MHz or more, which has not been realized before at home and abroad. In addition, before, whether single frequency or dual frequency laser interferometers were made in China or purchased abroad, each model had a nonlinear error of several nanometers or even more than ten nanometers. The nonlinear error of dual frequency laser interferometers with Kevar glass assembled He Ne laser as the light source was not more than 1 nanometers.
Source: China Youth Network
