Written by Jose Pozo of EPIC, June 24, 2020

In this interview, EPIC's CTO Jose Pozo spoke with Oliver Prochnow, CEO of VALO Innovations, a leader in the development and manufacture of unique ultrafast, sub-50 fs fiber laser systems.

After studying physics at Leibniz University in Hannover, Oliver completed his graduation thesis on ultrafast fiber lasers and ultrashort pulse generation at the Hannover Laser Center (LZH). Later, he also studied for a PhD in LZH, where his research interests were ultrafast fiber lasers, amplifiers and noise characteristics. For Oliver, his PhD is absolutely necessary, because he can not only learn all about fiber laser technology, but also learn to manage and organize projects, which has proven to be very useful.

In 2011, his first job was as R&D director at Venteon Laser Technologies, a young start-up company related to the University of Hannover, focusing on ultrafast Ti:Sa lasers. He was the first employee of Venteon and was responsible for introducing fiber technology to expand the company's product portfolio. One of the main advantages of working at Venteon is that because it is a small start-up company, this gives him valuable insights and research on all the activities needed to grow the company (ie advertising, marketing, product development, manufacturing).

In 2014, Venteon was acquired by Laser Quantum, and everything became larger and more structured. Oliver started developing some products in Hannover as a member of the Laser Quantum team, but three years later, Laser Quantum decided to transfer all development work from Hannover to the existing site in Konstanz in order to benefit from a single aspect.

After weighing his options, Oliver felt that this was a good opportunity to start something new. He founded a new company called VALO Innovations with a former colleague without any external funding. In the beginning, they established a good cooperative relationship with Laser Quantum. 

My company's idea is to develop and manufacture a unique ultrafast fiber laser system with a pulse duration of less than 50 fs. As Oliver explained, during his time at LZH, he always believed that fiber lasers could be used to make more products than at the time. The idea at the time was that nonlinearity and fiber were not attractive due to control issues, but Oliver believed that if the idea was correct, nonlinearity could be used to obtain pulses below 50 fs from fiber lasers.

The first task is to explore the technology and prove that the idea can work in the laboratory. They developed a prototype laser very quickly and were able to prove that not only can they generate ultrashort pulses with a pulse duration of less than 50 femtoseconds, but they can also realize the unique possibility of energy scanning.

The next step is to visit all the companies in the infrastructure of the Hannover laser manufacturing ecosystem, learn from them, and get advice on how potential customers can use their technology. As Oliver confirmed: "If you are convinced of your technology and see the advantages, it is easy to convince people that this is a good idea. But the important thing is to find out what the customer really needs: only good physical ideas It will not automatically lead to sales".

In the past two years, VALO Innovations has developed the following turnkey products based on ultra-fast femtosecond laser pulses and high average power, which can achieve huge peak power values:

Aalto: The pulse duration of this laser is less than 40 fs, the average output power is more than 250 mW, and the beam quality is perfect, which makes it very suitable for multiphoton microscopes, because the use of shorter pulses can improve imaging quality and results.

One of the challenges faced by Aalto's systems with such short pulse durations is dealing with very short light pulses, because the dispersion effect makes it difficult to obtain very short pulses from the laser to the sample. To overcome this problem, VALO Innovations implemented a dispersion compensation module in their laser, which makes it very easy to obtain the highest peak power directly on the sample, thereby eliminating the dispersion problem.

Tide: This is an energy-scaled version of the Aalto laser. It also provides a pulse duration of less than 40 fs and an average output power of more than 3W with very good beam quality, making it an ideal source for biophotonics and neuroscience/optogenetics.

Optogenetics is a very new field of biophotonics, which is based on the use of light to activate or inhibit the signal conduction of neurons, so as to be able to study the neural network of the brain. By using multiphoton excitation and faster scanning methods, a large number of neurons can be mapped.

For Oliver, the interesting thing about optogenetics is that you can activate individual neurons and observe what happens. This requires the use of very short laser pulses to produce a high signal-to-noise ratio. You can also use two photon apps to provide information about the depth inside the brain, which is not possible with a linear microscope.

Low-noise seed laser: This is a very low-noise seed laser, which can be set to any wavelength between 1010 nm and 1090 nm. They are very suitable to provide seeds for different types of amplifiers, such as Yb-based amplifiers at 1030 nm or Nd-based amplifiers at 1064 nm.

Technology: As with the aforementioned Aalto issue, there is a widespread misunderstanding that short pulses are too complex to be controlled. But as Oliver said, ultrashort pulses have many advantages, namely very high peak power and high degree of non-linearity that can be achieved. Short pulses also provide opportunities to increase optical bandwidth and access non-standard wavelengths, which is very interesting, especially for the semiconductor industry. For this reason, he believes that in the next few years, the demand for new products with shorter pulses will grow steadily.

Product: Oliver's goal is to make VALO Innovations one of the major players in the market with its system. In order to achieve this goal, they hope to expand the wavelength range of the laser. Therefore, they will be able to provide very short laser pulses of different wavelengths, for example, as low as 900 nm or as high as 1200 nm. Our idea is to have very small products that are easy to handle, very robust and low-cost in a certain wavelength range-these products are not currently available.

They also want to make their standard products have higher energy and increase the energy range. In this way, they can provide systems for a wider range of applications, such as micro-material processing that requires very short light pulses.

Partners: Since VALO is a small company with relatively little experience in mass manufacturing and production of products, in order to achieve faster growth, they need to cooperate with partners who can provide marketing and production expertise.

If you could start over, what different things would you do?

"The biggest challenge of starting a company is that there is a lot of work to do and not much time to focus on your product. One of the different things I will do is to review our activities regularly to ensure that we are aligned with our goals, not Wasting time doing things that look good but don’t actually help us achieve our goals."  

What advice do you have for the next generation of entrepreneurs?

"First of all, you have to believe in yourself and your strengths. If you believe in the product and it meets the actual market needs, then it can be sold, so just do it."

"Second, never forget your goal: you must have a vision for your company, because you have a lot of work, you can easily get lost in the details, and these details will bring pressure to you without considering the vision ".  

"Third, it is important to have a very good network so that you can talk to potential customers and partners. In this regard, EPIC is indeed our best choice because it gives us the opportunity to connect with people. Look. It’s amazing to have so many people advising or helping a young startup company — it’s totally unexpected, but absolutely great.”

Photo: Oliver Prochnow (left) and Carlos Lee, CEO of EPIC.

Written by Jose Pozo, Director of Technology and Innovation, EPIC (European Photonic Industry Alliance)

Tags: VALO Innovation, EPIC, Oliver Prochnow, ultrafast fiber laser, fiber

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