Software … powerful tools for your research & development!

Computer Modeling for Laser Development and Laser Science

with Modeling and Design Software from RP Photonics

RP Photonics has developed powerful simulation and design software. For all software packages described here, user licenses are available; alternatively, you can profit from it through technical consulting.

Available Software Products

In the following, we give a brief overview. More detailed descriptions are offered on separate pages, see the menu.

RP Fiber Power for Designing Fiber Lasers, Amplifiers and other Fiber Devices

RP Fiber Power

RP Fiber Power is a very powerful tool for designing passive and active fiber devices. In particular, it is suitable for fiber amplifiers and lasers of many types, including those for pulsed operation, even with ultrashort pulses. It greatly helps for understanding and optimizing performance details such as bend loss, coupling effects, amplifier gain, noise figure, feedback sensitivity and power efficiency. It can be used even for most sophisticated level schemes (e.g. in upconversion lasers) and also for bulk lasers and amplifiers. The tool is extremely flexible due to its built-in script language.

NEW: RP Fiber Power V8 comes with Power Forms, allowing even sophisticated simulations out of the box. Just fill out a form and start the calculation!

(see more details)

The Free RP Fiber Calculator for Calculations on Passive Optical Fibers

RP Fiber Calculator

RP Fiber Calculator is a convenient tool for calculations on optical fibers.

Specifically, it calculates the detailed properties of all guided modes for a given refractive index or doping profile. Also, it can use those mode data for calculations on launching light into single-mode or multimode fibers, and the coupling between different fibers, and also reflections at angled fiber ends.

We offer the basic version of RP Fiber Calculator (with limited functionality) for free, and sell licenses for the enhanced PRO version.

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RP Resonator for Laser Resonator Design

RP Resonator

RP Resonator can be used for designing optical resonators, in particular laser resonators. It can calculate a wide range of mode properties of such resonators (such as the variation of beam radii, the sensitivity e.g. to thermal lensing and misalignment, dispersion from geometric effects, etc.), and can do sophisticated optimizations.

For example, RP Resonator can be used for designing laser cavities which simultaneously meet a number of requirements, such as given mode sizes at certain positions, minimum sensitivity to thermal lensing and misalignment, minimum effect of aberrations on the beam quality, etc.

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RP ProPulse for the Simulation of Pulse Propagation

RP ProPulse

RP ProPulse can simulate the propagation of short optical pulses, for example

(Pulse propagation in optical fibers is also possible, but here we recommend RP Fiber Power.)

The very flexible user interface combined with powerful scripting features allows one to quickly define the problem, generate output in the form of any kind of diagrams (including time/frequency plots and spectrograms), import or export tabulated data, and do sophisticated evaluations (for example, statistical processing for extracting noise properties).

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RP Coating for the Design of Multilayer Structures

RP Coating

RP Coating is a powerful and particularly flexible tool for the design of complex multilayer structures, such as

  • laser mirrors and mirrors for dispersion compensation
  • optical filters, e.g. edge filters
  • etalons
  • broadband anti-reflection coatings
  • thin-film polarizers
  • semiconductor saturable absorbers (SESAMs) and lasers

A great variety of properties of the structures can be calculated and numerically optimized, including reflection and transmission amplitudes and phases, chromatic dispersion, internal field distribution, etc. The user interface makes it easy to define multilayer structures in various ways.

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RP Q-switch for Designing Q-switched Lasers

RP Q-switch can simulate the evolution of optical power and gain in Q-switched lasers (including bulk lasers and fiber lasers) and in subsequent amplifier stages. This software is controlled via forms.

(see more details)

See our detailed presentation on how computer simulations can make your laser development more efficient:

presentation

Benefits for Research and Development

The central benefits of working with such software tools are:

  • You can minimize the cost of product development and the time to market.
  • You can develop better products,
    e.g. with improved performance and reliability.
  • You can gather new ideas
    e.g. for improvements or for new products.
  • You will increase your general technical competence.

In short: make progress, have fun, save money!

Quality Matters

Our software is not only powerful, but has a very high quality in various respects:

  • The underlying equations are based on a very decent physical understanding and the knowledge of relevant scientific literature.
  • The software design has been carefully planned from the beginning, enabling e.g. easy future expansions without changing the concept.
  • The programs have been carefully validated in many details, e.g. by comparison with analytically calculated results for special situations, or by detailed comparison with results from other researchers.
  • The user interfaces are so flexible that it is never necessary to include project-specific details in the source code. Instead, the user can develop scripts to implement even the most sophisticated simulations and optimizations.
  • The software comes with carefully made comprehensive documentation.
  • Users obtain high-quality technical support.

Before you try to develop such software yourself, consider the risks associated with required development time (always more than originally expected!), non-ideal algorithms (compromising accuracy and/or computation time) and errors (possibly misleading your development team). And note that software is only one requirement for numerical modeling: even more importantly, you need a detailed physical understanding, knowledge of possible approaches and mathematical techniques, experience concerning how to make a model useful, etc. Having a real expert for such jobs is certainly worth a lot.

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