- Home
- Engineers...
Engineers produce the world's first practical Titanium-sapphire laser on a chip
As lasers go, those made of Titanium-sapphire (Ti:sapphire) are considered to have "unmatched" performance. They are indispensable in many fields, including cutting-edge quantum optics, spectroscopy, and neuroscience. But that performance comes at a steep price. Ti:sapphire lasers are big, on the order of cubic feet in volume. They are expensive, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each. And they require other high-powered lasers, themselves costing $30,000 each, to supply them with enough energy to function.
As a result, Ti:sapphire lasers have never achieved the broad, real-world adoption they deserve—until now. In a dramatic leap forward in scale, efficiency, and cost, researchers at Stanford University have built a Ti:sapphire laser on a chip. The prototype is four orders of magnitude smaller (10,000x) and three orders less expensive (1,000x) than any Ti:sapphire laser ever produced.
"This is a complete departure from the old model," said Jelena Vučković, the Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership, a professor of electrical engineering, and senior author of the paper introducing the chip-scale Ti:sapphire laser published in the journal Nature.
"Instead of one large and expensive laser, any lab might soon have hundreds of these valuable lasers on a single chip. And you can fuel it all with a green laser pointer."
Profound benefits
"When you leap from tabletop size and make something producible on a chip at such a low cost, it puts these powerful lasers in reach for a lot of different important applications," said Joshua Yang, a doctoral candidate in Vučković's lab and co-first author of the study along with Vučković's Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab colleagues, research engineer Kasper Van Gasse and postdoctoral scholar Daniil M. Lukin.
In technical terms, Ti:sapphire lasers are so valuable because they have the largest "gain bandwidth" of any laser crystal, explained Yang. In simple terms, gain bandwidth translates to the broader range of colors the laser can produce compared to other lasers. It's also ultrafast, Yang said. Pulses of light issue forth every quadrillionth of a second.
But Ti:sapphire lasers are also hard to come by. Even Vučković's lab, which does cutting-edge quantum optics experiments, only has a few of these prized lasers to share. The new Ti:sapphire laser fits on a chip that is measured in square millimeters. If the researchers can mass-produce them on wafers, potentially thousands, perhaps tens-of-thousands of Ti:sapphire lasers could be squeezed on a disk that fits in the palm of a human hand.
"A chip is light. It is portable. It is inexpensive and it is efficient. There are no moving parts. And it can be mass-produced," Yang said. "What's not to like? This democratizes Ti:sapphire lasers."
How it's done
To fashion the new laser, the researchers began with a bulk layer of Titanium-sapphire on a platform of silicon dioxide (SiO2), all riding atop true sapphire crystal.
They then grind, etch, and polish the Ti:sapphire to an extremely thin layer, just a few hundred nanometers thick. Into that thin layer, they then pattern a swirling vortex of tiny ridges. These ridges are like fiber-optic cables, guiding the light around and around, building in intensity. In fact, the pattern is known as a waveguide.
"Mathematically speaking, intensity is power divided by area. So, if you maintain the same power as the large-scale laser, but reduce the area in which it is concentrated, the intensity goes through the roof," Yang says. "The small scale of our laser actually helps us make it more efficient."
The remaining piece of the puzzle is a microscale heater that warms the light traveling through the waveguides, allowing the Vučković team to change the wavelength of the emitted light to tune the color of the light anywhere between 700 and 1,000 nanometers—in the red to infrared.
Spotlight on applications
Vučković, Yang, and colleagues are most excited about the range of fields that such a laser might impact. In quantum physics, the new laser provides an inexpensive and practical solution that could dramatically scale down state-of-the-art quantum computers.
In neuroscience, the researchers can foresee immediate application in optogenetics, a field that allows scientists to control neurons with light guided inside the brain by relatively bulky optical fiber. Small-scale lasers, they say, might be integrated into more compact probes opening up new experimental avenues.
In ophthalmology, it might find new use with Nobel Prize-winning chirped pulse amplification in laser surgery or offer less expensive, more compact optical coherence tomography technologies used to assess retinal health.
Next up, the team is working on perfecting their chip-scale Ti:sapphire laser and on ways to mass-produce them, thousands at a time, on wafers. Yang will earn his doctorate this summer based on this research and is working to bring the technology to market.
"We could put thousands of lasers on a single 4-inch wafer," Yang says. "That's when the cost per laser starts to become almost zero. That's pretty exciting."
More information: Jelena Vučković, Titanium:sapphire-on-insulator integrated lasers and amplifiers, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07457-2. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07457-2
Provided by Stanford University
This story was originally published on Phys.org. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest sci-tech news updates.- https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/engineers-produce-the-world-s-first-practical-titanium-sapphire-laser-on-a-chip/ar-BB1oW7lh?ocid=00000000
Related
2024 Perovskite Breakthroughs are the Future of Solar
Download Opera for free using https://opr.as/04-Opera-Browser-UndecidedMF Thanks Opera for sponsoring this video! 2024 Perovskite Breakthroughs are the Future of Solar. Perovskites are often hailed as the next big thing for solar panels. They’re more efficient than silicon PVs could ever be, and they have higher yields. However, their fragility and short lifespans have relegated them to the lab...so far. But 2024 is looking to be the year of the perovskite. The last few months have seen new perovskite researchers all over the world smashing records, including durability. Because of this, some of these new perovskites are even set to hit the market this year. Let’s check out some of the most exciting breakthroughs in the field and see for ourselves if perovskites are finally ready for their big debut. And why should you care? Mentioned Videos Exploring a New Transparent Solar Cell Breakthrough: https://youtu.be/uqyCjrQyT4U Top 5 Solar Energy Advances Using Perovskites https://youtu.be/OYzCq8YWAHw Perovskite Solar Cells Could Be the Future of Energy https://youtu.be/YWU89g7sj7s Watch Is This Accidental Discovery The Future Of Energy? https://youtu.be/ZyY1PLTlmT0?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi4dFnLD9622FK77atWtQVv7 Video script and citations: https://undecidedmf.com/2024-perovskite-breakthroughs-are-the-future-of-solar/ Get my achieve energy security with solar guide: https://link.undecidedmf.com/solar-guide Follow-up podcast: Video version - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4-aWB84Bupf5hxGqrwYqLA Audio version - http://bit.ly/stilltbdfm Join the Undecided Discord server: https://link.undecidedmf.com/discord 👋 Support Undecided on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/mattferrell ⚙️ Gear & Products I Like https://undecidedmf.com/shop/ Visit my Energysage Portal (US): Research solar panels and get quotes for free! https://link.undecidedmf.com/energysage And find heat pump installers near you (US): https://link.undecidedmf.com/energysage-heatpumps Or find community solar near you (US): https://link.undecidedmf.com/community-solar For a curated solar buying experience (Canada) EnergyPal's free personalized quotes: https://energypal.com/undecided Tesla Referral Code: Get 1,000 free supercharging miles or a discount on Tesla Solar & Powerwalls https://ts.la/matthew84515 👉 Follow Me Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@mattferrell X https://twitter.com/mattferrell https://twitter.com/undecidedMF Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@mattferrell Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mattferrell https://www.instagram.com/undecidedmf Facebook https://www.facebook.com/undecidedMF/ Website https://undecidedmf.com 📺 YouTube Tools I Recommend Audio file(s) provided by Epidemic Sound http://bit.ly/UndecidedEpidemic TubeBuddy https://www.tubebuddy.com/undecided VidIQ https://vidiq.com/undecided I may earn a small commission for my endorsement or recommendation to products or services linked above, but I wouldn't put them here if I didn't like them. Your purchase helps support the channel and the videos I produce. Thank you.
NewsTwo West Virginia fishermen catch record-breaking fish the same day within hours of each other
Officials say Lindell Marker of Sod, W.Va., caught a 17.36-inch black crappie at 7:30 am on August 8, surpassing the previous length record of 17.32 inches set by Craig Webb, also at Woodrum Lake. Marker’s catch tied the existing weight record of 2.85 pounds, also held by Webb. At 8:45 a.m., Dwight Priestley of Alum Creek, W.Va., caught a 17.76-inch, 3.15-pound black crappie that surpassed Marker’s shortly-held record and set new records for...
NewsKamala Harris's DNC Acceptance Speech—Fact-Checked
Newsweek's Fact Check team has checked Kamla Harris's acceptance speech at the DNC in detail.
News2024 Audi SQ6 - Interior and Exterior in details
Audi SQ6 e-tron (2024) - Visual Review System Output: 380 kW (510 Hp) 0-100 (km/h): 4.3 s Top Speed: 230 km/h Range WLTP: 625 km Base Price: €93.800 Special thanks to @AudiDE #audi
NewsUK tycoon's daughter is seventh, final victim of Sicily yacht sinking
Divers searching a sunken superyacht off Sicily recovered the body of the teenage daughter of UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch Friday, the seventh and final victim of a tragedy in which the businessman also perished. Search teams had recovered the bodies of four of Lynch's friends on Wednesday, and that of the entrepreneur himself on Thursday.
NewsFirst 10 things to do if you got a new PC
Got a new PC? Kurt “CyberGuy" Knutsson is here with some suggestions to help you get things set up on your new device.
NewsMicrosoft to ditch ‘iconic’ Windows feature after 40 years
Microsoft to ditch ‘iconic’ Windows feature after 40 years - The world’s most popular operating system will soon lose the 39-year-old Control Panel
NewsUnknown Human Lineage Found Buried in The Neanderthal Genome
As Homo sapiens migrated into Eurasia more than 70,000 years ago, much of the continent was already inhabited by Neanderthals, hominins who shared an ancestor with us but had spent roughly half a million years diverging. We don't know much about their ensuing relationship, but it was probably contentious at times. While Neanderthals eventually disappeared 40,000 years ago, there are now 8 billion of us. During their Late Pleistocene overlap in...
News