NASA SBIR 2015 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Vescent Photonics, Inc.
14998 West 6th Avenue, #700
Golden, CO 80401 - 5025
(303) 296-6766

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Juan M Pino
jpino@vescent.com
14998 West 6th Ave #700
Golden, CO 80401 - 5025
(303) 296-6766

CORPORATE/BUSINESS OFFICIAL (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Scott Rommel
rommel@vescent.com
14998 West 6th Avenue, #700
Golden, CO 80401 - 5025
(303) 296-6766

Estimated Technology Readiness Level (TRL) at beginning and end of contract:
Begin: 3
End: 4

Technology Available (TAV) Subtopics
Atomic Interferometry is a Technology Available (TAV) subtopic that includes NASA Intellectual Property (IP). Do you plan to use the NASA IP under the award?
No

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
Vescent Photonics proposes to bring an environmentally robust, compact, high fidelity frequency comb to the commercial market. This will be comb based on a NIST design, augmented with a high bandwidth graphene modulator. Vescent will partner with MRADS, a CU spin-off commercializing high bandwidth graphene modulators for mode-locked lasers. These modulators will both improve performance of the NIST comb and also give Vescent the freedom to operate in the commercial market. These devices will be incorporated into the packages developed during this Phase I and will be a central component of the final deliverable: a pair of high fidelity frequency combs.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
Frequency combs could be infused to future NASA CAL missions. In addition, combs from this Phase II could support JPL�s Massively Parallel, Cavity-Enhanced, Laser Spectroscopy for Planetary and Lunar Exploration (MCELS) program. Finally, frequency combs could be modified to provide calibration for ground telescopes searching for exo-planets (Astro-combs).

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
A robust, commercially available frequency comb will have significant collateral benefit to civilian and defense applications. Frequency combs have found their way into the search for exoplanets, introduced powerful techniques for parallel spectroscopy of explosives and biochemical weapons, and provided coherent LIDAR as an alternative to laser ranging.