Physicists Finally Figured Out How to Fit an Ultrafast Pulsing Laser onto a Microscopic Computer Chip
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Facebook X LinkedIn Reddit WhatsApp Flipboard Bluesky Email Copy Link Home → Science → News An overlooked laser design could make ultrafast optics smaller and cheaper.
Ultrafast lasers are the heavy artillery of modern optics. Their intense, rapid pulses power eye surgeries, precision manufacturing, and the world’s most accurate atomic clocks. But these revolutionary tools have always suffered from glaring physical drawbacks.
They are massive, costly, and typically require entire laboratory tables to function. Now, a team of scientists in Switzerland has squeezed much of that power onto a single, tiny photonic chip. The implication is clear: ultrafast lasers will soon be ready to become portable instruments.
The researchers at EPFL report that their chip-based ultrafast laser produces 1.05 nanojoules of energy in pulses that can be compressed to 147 femtoseconds. A femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second. That exceeds the performance of previous photonic-chip ultrafast sources by more than two orders of magnitude and begins to rival fiber-based laboratory systems.
The team did not invent a brand-new laser principle. Instead, it revisited an older design called the Mamyshev oscillator, an architecture long known in fiber lasers but largely overlooked in integrated photonics. “For more than twenty years, a high-pulse-energy femtosecond laser on chip was widely regarded as a holy grail of integrated photonics,” said Tobias Kippenberg, a photonics professor at EPFL.
“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.” A photonic chip guides light through tiny channels called waveguides. The problem is that squeezing powerful laser pulses into such narrow paths can make the light unstable. The Mamyshev design solves part of that problem by using two optical filters.
Strong pulses broaden into a wider spread of colors and pass through. Weak, destabilizing light does not broaden enough and gets filtered out.
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