Barcelona-based Radiantis, a specialist manufacturer of advanced frequency conversion systems for laser tuning, and one of the seven founding members of SECPHO recently launched a brand new product. The SeaWave. An impressively compact and rugged IR spectrometer, which seems to be making friends wherever it goes.

It was certainly the company’s star performer at CLEO 2014 in California earlier this year, where, by all accounts, it caused more than a few ripples of interest, if you’ll excuse the pun, when it was unveiled to the San Jose event’s thousands of visitors.

Okay, not quite to fireworks and red carpets, but certainly a warm welcome from representatives of the scientific, medical and food sectors, who stand to benefit most from the SeaWave’s relatively small size, its reliability and its high performance specification. Delivering, as it does, not only speed and convenience in the measurement of spectra across the 900 – 1700nm range, but also compatibility with CW, pulsed and ultrafast laser systems.

Radiantis was established in 2005 as a spin-off company from the Institute of Photonic Science (ICFO) in Barcelona. (That’s the Institut de Ciències Fotòniques, in case you were pausing at the acronym.) It’s main goal being to enrich the laser market with state-of-the-art, robust and easy-to-use nonlinear systems to expand the wavelength tunability of available lasers.

Today, the company has made sizeable strides towards that goal and is well integrated in the academic and research community with many affiliations to local and international student bodies with whom, in conjunction with SECPhO, it organizes regular ‘knowledge exchange’ events.

This, plus the genuine popularity of its products, has allowed Radiantis to assist a broad worldwide network of satisfied customers across the US, Europe and Asia.

But platitudes aside, for those of you who might crave more technical information about the SeaWave, its most notable key features are probably as follows:

• Very compact design
• Wide spectral response range (900 – 1700 nm)
• Excellent spectral resolution (3 nm for 900 – 1700 nm range)
• Hi frame-rate (up to >1000 spectra / second)
• Hi-speed USB interface with 16 bit ADC resolution
• User-friendly control software package and programming platform •Configurable for narrower spectral ranges with higher resolution
• Extended spectral ranges available

And from an engineering perspective, it boasts not only the smallest footprint in the market for its class, but no moving parts. Which is apparently a good thing when it comes to its reliability for use in OEM and scientific applications.

All in all, a practical spectrometer which can be used in a broad range of applications in both OEM and scientific applications that can also be customised to meet the needs of specific applications, with higher resolution values across shorter detection ranges.

Oh, and you can get it in purple. Which is nice.