InGaN-diode-pumped AlGaInP VECSEL with sub-kHz linewidth at 689 nm.

We report the design, growth, and characterization of an AlGaInP-based VECSEL, designed to be optically-pumped with an inexpensive high power blue InGaN diode laser, for emission around 689 nm. Up to 140 mW output power is achieved in a circularly-symmetric single transverse (TEM00) and single longitudinal mode, tunable from 683 to 693 nm. With intensity stabilization of the pump diode and frequency-stabilization of the VECSEL resonator to a reference cavity via the Pound-Drever-Hall technique, we measure the power spectral density of the VECSEL frequency noise, reporting sub-kHz linewidth at 689 nm. The VECSEL relative intensity noise (RIN) is <-130 dBc/Hz for all frequencies above 100 kHz. This compact laser system is suitable for use in quantum technologies, particularly those based on laser-cooled and trapped strontium atoms.

BEAM web server: a tool for structural RNA motif discovery.

Motivation: RNA structural motif finding is a relevant problem that becomes computationally hard when working on high-throughput data (e.g. eCLIP, PAR-CLIP), often represented by thousands of RNA molecules. Currently, the BEAM server is the only web tool capable to handle tens of thousands of RNA in input with a motif discovery procedure that is only limited by the current secondary structure prediction accuracies. Results: The recently developed method BEAM (BEAr Motifs finder) can analyze tens of thousands of RNA molecules and identify RNA secondary structure motifs associated to a measure of their statistical significance. BEAM is extremely fast thanks to the BEAR encoding that transforms each RNA secondary structure in a string of characters. BEAM also exploits the evolutionary knowledge contained in a substitution matrix of secondary structure elements, extracted from the RFAM database of families of homologous RNAs. The BEAM web server has been designed to streamline data pre-processing by automatically handling folding and encoding of RNA sequences, giving users a choice for the preferred folding program. The server provides an intuitive and informative results page with the list of secondary structure motifs identified, the logo of each motif, its significance, graphic representation and information about its position in the RNA molecules sharing it. Availability and implementation: The web server is freely available at http://beam.uniroma2.it/ and it is implemented in NodeJS and Python with all major browsers supported. Contact: marco.pietrosanto@uniroma2.it. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

1.4 µm continuous-wave diamond Raman laser.

The longest wavelength (~1.4 µm) emitted by a diamond Raman laser pumped by a semiconductor disk laser (SDL) is reported. The output power of the intracavity-pumped Raman laser reached a maximum of 2.3 W with an optical conversion efficiency of 3.4% with respect to the absorbed diode pump power. Narrow Stokes emission (FWHM <0.1 nm) was attained using etalons to limit the fundamental spectrum to a single etalon peak. Tuning of the Raman laser over >40 nm was achieved via rotation of an intracavity birefringent filter that tuned the SDL oscillation wavelength.