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EPFL’s chip-based ultrafast laser operating in the laboratory test setup. The device produces extremely short laser pulses directly on a photonic chip. \u00a92026 EPFL\/Zheru Qiu<\/p>\nEPFL researchers have built a photonic chip that rivals much larger laboratory lasers, delivers extremely short, high-energy optical pulses, and could reshape technologies like medical diagnoistics and optical atomic clocks.<\/p>\n
Ultrafast lasers emit pulses lasting only a few hundred femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second. These flashes of light power applications from precision micromachining, eye surgery to optical frequency combs, the Nobel Prize-winning technology behind today’s most precise optical atomic clocks. Yet despite more than two decades of effort, ultrafast lasers have largely remained bulky, expensive systems confined to optical tables.<\/p>\n
Now a team led by Professor Tobias J. Kippenberg at EPFL has brought them onto a photonic chip. Publishing in Nature, the researchers report the first integrated ultrafast laser that rivals table-top femtosecond lasers, delivering 1.05 nanojoules in pulses as short as 147 femtoseconds.<\/p>\n
Photonic chips guide and process light in microscopic channels called waveguides patterned on a wafer, much like how electronic microchips route electricity. Already widely used in telecommunications, photonic chips have miniaturized complex functions that once required much larger systems.<\/p>\n
“For more than twenty years, a high-pulse-energy femtosecond laser on chip was widely regarded as a holy grail of integrated photonics,” says Kippenberg. “Our result shows that it is not only possible, but that it can be achieved with a surprisingly elegant architecture that the integrated-photonics community had overlooked.”<\/p>\n
An overlooked design<\/p>\n
The EPFL team turned to a largely overlooked laser design known as the Mamyshev oscillator. In the laser cavity, a nonlinear waveguide sits between two optical filters that each let through a different slice of the color spectrum. When a strong pulse travels through the waveguide, it broadens into a wider range of colors, allowing part of it to pass through both filters and keep circulating. Weak light does not broaden enough and is rejected.<\/p>\n
“This design is especially attractive because it does not require any component that is difficult to make on this erbium-doped silicon nitride chip,” explains Zheru Qiu, a co-leading author of the paper.<\/p>\n
EPFL’s chip-based ultrafast laser operating in the laboratory test setup. The device produces extremely short laser pulses directly on a photonic chip. \u00a92026 EPFL\/Zheru Qiu<\/p>\n
Tiny laser, broad impact<\/p>\n
On the chip, the 42-cm-long laser cavity can be folded into a space the size of a match head, far smaller than optical fiber-based lasers. Because these photonic chips can be manufactured at wafer scale, much like computer chips, more than 1000 laser cavities could be produced at once, opening a path toward much lower-cost ultrafast lasers for sensing, spectroscopy and metrology. “With kilowatt-level peak powers, the chip can drive demanding applications that have long depended on large, expensive laboratory lasers,” says Qiu.<\/p>\n
The result could lead to portable and affordable tools for detecting pollutants, revealing hidden defects and performing medical diagnostics, while opening a path toward compact optical atomic clocks for future communication and navigation.<\/p>\n
Other contributors<\/p>\n
EPFL Institute of Electrical and MicroengineeringHelmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EPFL researchers have built a photonic chip that rivals much larger laboratory lasers, delivers extremely short, high-energy optical…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":714286,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,63,105],"class_list":["post-714285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=714285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/714286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=714285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=714285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=714285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}