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Background
 
Company Profile
 
Who we are

Time-Bandwidth Products specializes in diode-pumped solid-state lasers, passively mode-locked using SESAM technology to generate ultrashort laser light pulses with pulsewidths in the range of femtoseconds to picoseconds. This technology enables a broad range of new applications of ultrafast lasers in areas such as precision measurements, sensing, optoelectronic testing, optical communication, clocking and switching, medical and life-science diagnostics, material processing and frequency conversion.

The company was founded in late 1994 to commercialize new developments in diode-pumped ultrafast laser systems. We are the only authorized spin-off of the Ultrafast Laser Physics group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (also known as ETH, "Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule") and located in the city of Zurich. The company is a Swiss corporation ("Aktiengesellschaft" or AG).
What our name means
The term "time-bandwidth product" comes from the relation between a pulse's duration in time and the frequencies necessary to construct them (its bandwidth). For ideal pulses, the product of the pulsewidth times its bandwidth has a minimum constant value.

As a simple analogy of this concept, consider the speed of a communication channel, such as a modem. Downloading a certain quantity of data requires a minimum amount of time, limited by the speed of the channel. The more bandwidth (baud rate), the less time it takes to transmit information. There is always a minimum "time-bandwidth product", i.e. the product of the download time times the baud rate is a constant for a given amount of information.

Returning to lasers, this principle simply tells us that shorter pulses require more bandwidth. The product of the pulsewidth times its bandwidth, however, remains constant. Most of our lasers use a significant fraction of the available bandwidth of the laser material, so this time-bandwidth product is a daily reminder of how short we can squeeze our pulsewidths.

In addition, we characterize our lasers both in the time domain (with sampling scopes and autocorrelators) and in the frequency domain (with microwave spectrum analyzers and optical spectrum analyzers). This two-domain point-of-view allows us to fully "see" our lasers performance and to ensure that they operate to the peak of their abilities.