TOPTICA Photonics is a German manufacturer of lasers for quantum technologies, biophotonics and material inspection. [1]
TOPTICA Photonics is a German manufacturer of lasers for quantum technologies, biophotonics and material inspection. [1]
The company was initially founded in February 1998 under the name TuiOptics GmbH for selling grating tuned diode lasers, but in 2001 it was renamed to TOPTICA Photonics AG. [2] [3] TOPTICA won the contract to provide laser guide stars for the Very Large Telescope in 2010 [4] and for the Extremely Large Telescope in 2017. [5] TOPTICA sponsored the joint OSA/DPG Herbert Walther Award and the American Physical Society's 2018 Norman F. Ramsey Prize. [6] Since 2021 Toptica is entitled for research and development incentivation from the state of Germany (BSFZ).
TOPTICA Photonics AG is a privately held [7] joint-stock company headquartered in Graefelfing near Munich in Germany with more than 490 employees and appr. 130 M€ turnover. Its subsidiary TOPTICA Photonics Inc. maintains the US facilities in New York State, [8] [9] whereas the Japanese subsidiary TOPTICA Photonics K.K. is headquartered in Tokyo and the Chinese subsidiaries are located in Beijing and Shanghai. [10] [11] The subsidiary TOPTICA Projects GmbH develops laser guide stars. [12] [13] In 2023 Azurlight Systems (France) was acquired and added under the name TOPTICA Photonics SAS.
A laser guide star is an artificial star image created for use in astronomical adaptive optics systems, which are employed in large telescopes in order to correct atmospheric distortion of light. Adaptive optics (AO) systems require a wavefront reference source of light called a guide star. Natural stars can serve as point sources for this purpose, but sufficiently bright stars are not available in all parts of the sky, which greatly limits the usefulness of natural guide star adaptive optics. Instead, one can create an artificial guide star by shining a laser into the atmosphere. Light from the beam is reflected by components in the upper atmosphere back into the telescope. This star can be positioned anywhere the telescope desires to point, opening up much greater amounts of the sky to adaptive optics.
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