Scientists figured out how to shrink huge ultrafast lasers so they fit on a tiny chip — the 'holy grail' of the field
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By using a decades-old overlooked laser architecture, scientists managed to fit an ultrafast laser onto a tiny photonic chip — a chip that uses light, rather than electricity, for computing operations. In a new study published June 3 in the journal Nature, the team demonstrated that a tiny laser on the photonic chip could deliver 1.05 nanojoules of energy in 147-femtosecond (147 quadrillionths of a second) bursts — thereby competing with the output of laboratory-class ultrafast lasers. Ultrafast lasers are used in a variety of applications, from precision manufacturing and eye surgery to biological imaging and atomic clocks, but the systems needed to power them tend to take up whole tabletops in labs or factories.
Yet the powerful output of these laser pulses made them difficult to miniaturise onto photonic chips. "For more than twenty years, a high-pulse-energy femtosecond laser on chip was widely regarded as a holy grail of integrated photonics," Tobias Kippenberg, a photonics professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology(EPFL), said in a statement. "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." Photonic chips manipulate light by using microscopic structures called waveguides — usually in the form of optical fibers or etched cavities — to carry information.
They aren't particularly novel, and can be found in fiber-optic communications, medical sensors and lidar systems. Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. But photonic chips have previously struggled when handling high-powered, ultrafast lasers.
That's because they need to contain light to extremely small waveguides, leading the light to interact strongly with itself and destabilizing the laser pulses.
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