CAIRN Multiline Laserbank

[Jeff Spector]

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Greetings

 If anyone on this list has experience using a CAIRN multi line laser bank and/or LuxX lasers from Omicron I'd like to hear what you think. We're thinking about purchasing one in the near future but we tend to use mostly Coherent Inc lasers so I'm curious to know what others experiences are..

Thanks,

 -Jeff

[Nic Cade-2]

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Hi Jeff,
We've been using the Cairn laser bank on a tirf/storm rig for over a year, and also recently on a spinning disk system. I can't fault them.
The main laser bank is very compact (certainly compared to the monoliths some other companies sell) and is very flexible in terms of the the type and combination of lasers that can be mounted (up to six). For our storm system, the bank is set up such that we can easily add another 640nm laser in the future, to instantly double the effective power should we need to.
The control unit for the laser bank is also fully accessible via bnc connectors on the front panel, should you need to modulate the laser powers manually or via other software.
For both our systems, the laser bank and control unit are mounted on a shelf above the microscope, so we don't have to worry about optical fibres trailing around the room.
Cheers
Nic