Laser Control Tool - Zeiss LSM 880 Operating Manual

LSM 880
1.1

Laser Control tool

The Laser Control tool shows the NLO laser as an
additional laser of the system.
Operation of the Chameleon (Coherent), OPO
and Mai Tai (Spectra Physics) laser
• Click On to activate the laser for the software.
The laser is put from Standby to Operation
mode (MaiTai lasers from Spectra Physics) and
the power ramps up. Chameleon lasers from
Coherent have to be switched from Standby to
Operation mode via the interlock key on the
laser electronics. This takes a few minutes until the laser is ready. The system now has access to the
laser and reads out the actual status of the laser. Switching a Chameleon laser to On in the Laser tool
opens the shutter inside the laser and only then it can pump an OPO (if available). For the highlighted
laser the arrow drop down menu provides information of the laser status. The laser has to be mode
locked for operation and for pumping the OPO.
• If the laser is equipped with a pre-compensation unit (prechirp unit) like the versions: Chameleon
Vision or Mai Tai DeepSee, a slider and edit box show up in the Laser Properties panel allowing to
set the GDD value to a different position. The system is delivered with a preset calibration curve for
the GDD values. If that does not represent the optimal values for the specific laser the values can be
changed and stored. The values will then be set to the newly defined value for the corresponding
wavelength.
Control of laser optimization
Chameleon lasers perform a constant optimization
of the laser power output in relation to the
wavelength setting.
This can lead to slight but maybe visible intensity
fluctuations in the image especially following
changes in wavelength.
To avoid having this affecting the image quality
ZEN can control this process in conjunction with
image acquisition.
To enable this procedure, activate the Control
Laser Optimization function in the System
Options tool/Hardware tab (Fig. 2).
The optimization procedure will then not take
place if an image is acquired but either before or
after the acquisition.
10/2014 V_01
CHAPTER 5 - MULTIPHOTON LASER SCANNING ...
NLO (Non Linear Optics) Laser for LSM
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Fig. 1 Laser control tool
Fig. 2 System Options tool
ZEISS
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