Thomas Farrell

Tunable laser technology for sensing applications

Widely tunable lasers that have been developed for the telecommunications industry have many applications in the sensing industry and bring the advantages of technology robustness, volume low cost potential, ultra fast tuning capabilities and high performance. These traits are now being further exploited in sensing applications such as gas sensing, sensor interrogation systems, optical frequency domain reflectometry based systems and interformeteric sensing. The current paper gives an overview of a number of these areas and how tunable laser technologies, particularly those based on monolithic tunable lasers, are being successfully deployed in real world sensing scenarios.