In my journey to get orange coherent photos from P3+ I stumbled upon many obstacles the mayor one being managing and collimating pump beam. I started by using thorlabs cage system collimator setup but as anyone buying from thorlabs knows it's very expensive. LDH56-P2 originally used for experiments costs 117e +VAT and comes without any lens. Adding lens to the mix over doubles the price. This can't handle well high power diodes needed to pump solid state laser, doesn't allow any adjustment nor TEC temeprature control
Then someone recommended me the live lasersystem Sparrow system. They have considerably better prices for equipment that's still lab grade. 400e + VAT bought me dual laser collimator with cylindrical correction for lower M factor and TEC for temperature control. Additionally, every collimator package has a protective cover to keep optics clean from debris and dust. The 400e set also included everything needed to combine both beams into one using polarization beam splitter (PBS, waveplate, dielectric mirror, 2 kinematic mounts and baseplate).
In general, I'll probably start buying much more optics from live lasersystems than from thorlabs considering their superior pricing and equally good quality. The only minor inconvenience is their kinematic mounts. Flexures are considerably less user-friendly to adjust than thorlabs ones but considering price and size difference I think they are nice alternative in many places that are set-and-forget like beam combiner.
Then someone recommended me the live lasersystem Sparrow system. They have considerably better prices for equipment that's still lab grade. 400e + VAT bought me dual laser collimator with cylindrical correction for lower M factor and TEC for temperature control. Additionally, every collimator package has a protective cover to keep optics clean from debris and dust. The 400e set also included everything needed to combine both beams into one using polarization beam splitter (PBS, waveplate, dielectric mirror, 2 kinematic mounts and baseplate).
In general, I'll probably start buying much more optics from live lasersystems than from thorlabs considering their superior pricing and equally good quality. The only minor inconvenience is their kinematic mounts. Flexures are considerably less user-friendly to adjust than thorlabs ones but considering price and size difference I think they are nice alternative in many places that are set-and-forget like beam combiner.
