Researchers in the US have created the first high-performance, tuneable and narrow-linewidth visible-light lasers that are small enough to fit on a photonic chip. Developed by a team at the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science, the new lasers operate at wavelengths shorter than the red part of the electromagnetic spectrum and could be employed in technologies such as quantum optics, bioimaging and laser displays.
“Until now, lasers with performance similar to ones we have developed were benchtop-sized and expensive, which made them unsuitable for high impact technologies such as portable atomic clocks and AR/VR [augmented reality and virtual reality] devices,” explains Mateus Corato Zanarella, a member of Michal Lipson’s nanophotonics group at Columbia. “In our work we show how we can use integrated photonics to drastically shrink the size of complex laser systems.”
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