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Gooch & Housego recently received the Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Innovation for Fiber-Q. This Award for Enterprise: Innovation is given for achievements relating to product innovation and development which deliver significant improvement in business performance and commercial success. Introduced in 2009, the Fiber-Q has proved hugely successful as an innovative and cost saving product for a range of laser modulation applications in sectors including defense and security, life and health sciences and materials processing. The Queens Awards are traditionally announced on 21 April, the birthday of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II.

Engineers at their Torquay and Ilminster sites together took a holistic approach to develop a device for the fiber laser community that can be used to reproducibly modify and precisely control laser beams. This innovation, for the first time, brings the flexibility of acousto-optics to the fiber optic community in the form of a small, robust, low loss package easily be incorporated into all-fiber architecture without compromising the key benefits offered by fiber based systems. Acousto-optic modulation is a less complex, more robust, less costly and more flexible than more traditional solutions. This has led to its widespread deployment in an extremely wide range of applications.

G&H’s expertise in acousto-optics, fiber optics and photonic packaging have enabled them to bring a truly innovative product to market, both hermetically sealed where environmental conditions dictate the need for ruggedized components, and non-hermetic where a lower cost option is preferred.

This Fiber-Q™ has been adopted in a number of markets. In the primary market, industrial material processing, the benefits are both increased efficiency and reduced cost.

G&H’s had also received the Institute of Physics Award for Innovation, also for the Fiber-Q.