What should newcomers to take consideration when buying optical component and lasers?
Hi Ilayas
I would check the specific requirements of your application. What are you building ?
From that a good place to start is wavelength range, power required, beam quality and coherence. Do you need beam shaping optics etc … you can check out meetoptics academy pages as a starting point for tech specs and product guides. Laser fundamentals is a good place to start. Typically the suppliers also provide good documentation on use cases. Hope it helps!
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Thank you.
I think would like to build a pump-probe spectroscopy.
The things is that, when I go to the suppliers websites, some optical component has its own price. However, big things like, a setup of femtosecond laser do not have any detailed price but its only has a contact to begin with. What does this means actually?
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Femtosecond lasers are expensive and companies are hiding their prices - I guess they don’t want people to get immediately disappointed… Depending on what average power (1-100W), pulse energy (nJ-100uJ), pulse duration (10-1000fs), wavelength (1030, 532, 355, 700-800nm) … and which company, you are looking at 20-250k USD purchase price. Pump probe spectroscopy is rather the lower power range so 20-40k should be enough for a probe beam. Good luck
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Aha, I see, that’s way most of companies do not published the price for the femtosecond lasers. Do you have any experience in buying femtosecond lasers before? What kind of procedure that usually need to consider?.
Anyway, thank you for your answer.
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You can buy femtosecond lasers just like any other lasers. Ask for a quotation, place and order, pay the invoice, get it delivered. 
However, you should check the regulations in your country. Some countries require a laser safety officer or a license to operate lasers which are not Class 1 or 2. My experience is that customs often don’t bother checking these details, especially if you are ordering something for a business. For private individuals laser pointer and engravers might slip through customs but you would not want to risk such an expensive laser anyway.
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Okay Thank you very much, now It’s becoming clear to me how to buy femtosecond laser 
That’s important information for me actually, since I’ve never thought about it before, greatly appreciate it.
Anyway, do you ever have an experience to build femtosecond laser by yourself or with your research team? If yes, how much cost it takes to build femtosecond laser from scratch and how does it compare to buy it from company?
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I did build some femtosecond fibre lasers earlier for nonlinear microscopy. Fibre lasers are easy to built if you have a working design, but it’s difficult to do it because you need a lot of equipment - spectrum analysers, autocorrelator, power and energy meters, beam profiler etc.
The material cost will really depend on what kind of laser you are building. Electroptic switches and drivers, polarization control, special low GDD mirrors … it’s very special and expensive stuff. The final price will also depend on the company/institution which builds it. There is no general answer here for thr material price but regarding testing and building equipment you are looking at >150k investment before even starting with it
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That’s really surprising for me! 
Regarding what you said, that’s a lot of money, in my point of view
Let say, I wanna build Ti:sapphire like the drawing setup that I draw myself, please see the link for the detail components. mydrawing setup for the Ti:sapphire mode-locked laser.
Approximately how much USD will I spend on it all? I’m greatly sorry if this completely make you inconvenience, but I really need this overview for my future research directions.
Thank you very much Daniel! 
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The material cost will be roughly around $20k-30k, most of that will be the price of the - cheap - green pump laser. The rest of it is about evenly distributed between optics, optomechanics and electronics.
As mentioned, you will need a lot of equipment to test this. Use a laminar flow cabinet to build it.
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Okay, it’s look clear for me now about the things that need to be consider when building femtosecond laser. Thank you very much. 
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