Photon Systems develops, manufactures and sells a new type of deep ultraviolet laser intended for use in a wide array of commercial and industrial applications. The founders were previously the founders of Omnichrome, a successful manufacturer of helium-cadmium and air-cooled ion lasers for over 15 years, which was acquired by Melles Griot in 1997. The company's laser technology is applicable in the harshest environments, including potential applications in outer space exploration. The company's SHERLOC instrument will be one of two instruments on the distal end of the arm of a large planetary rover, similar to the Curiosity Rover, that will be flown to Mars in 2020. Photon Systems is a co-investigator on this 2020 mission with Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In addition, the company has developed several specialized custom instruments for application to detection of trace chemicals and microbial material in very harsh environments from the deep Ocean to Antarctica and the Arctic.
Other applications of the firm's technology include biotechnology applications such as drug development and other pharmaceutical research and product testing, protein conformation and other proteomics-related research, homeland security applications such as bioterrorism agent detection and identification and other microbial monitoring applications such as hospital surgery inspection, clinical diagnostics, environmental monitoring such as water, air and food quality; semiconductor development and processing related to synthetic diamond growth and direct wide bandgap semiconductor devices for high temperature but also including production testing of ball grid array surfaces in a production environment, solar blind detection, or UV semiconductor laser development, and a myriad of other applications where small spot sizes or photon-energy-specific excitation is needed or enabling.
