New ultra-small laser opens up a world of possibilities

Computing and medicine are among the many fields which could be revolutionised by a new form of ultra-small laser.

The innovation was created by an international team of scientists, including Dr David Moss, from the University of Sydney’s School of Physics. Featured on the front cover of the prestigious journal Nature Communications on 4 April, it is the first laser to be mode-locked, making it highly precise, ultrafast and ultrasmall.

“Our new laser opens up a whole field of possibilities in terms of high-precision, ultrasmall, integrated lasers,” said Dr Moss, who is based at CUDOS - the ARC Centre of Excellence for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems - and the Institute of Photonics and Optical Science at the University of Sydney.

“It’s the first time we’ve been able to use a microcavity resonator to lock the modes of a laser, which is how ultrashort pulsed lasers are created. Lasers that have their modes locked generate the shortest optical pulses of light.”

Making lasers that can pulse at very high and flexible repetition rates - much higher than those achieved with electronics - is a field that has been pursued by scientists around the world. Different research groups have proposed a variety of solutions to creating these lasers, but this is the first success.

“Our new laser achieves extremely stable operation at unprecedentedly high repetition rates of 200 GHz, while maintaining very narrow linewidths, which leads to an extremely high-quality pulsed emission,” said Dr Moss.

The team Dr Moss worked with included scientists from Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique in Canada, the Istituto per i Processi Chimico-Fisici (part of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Italy) and Infinera in the USA.

“As well as being ultrasmall, this new laser is versatile, stable and efficient, which offers many exciting applications in a huge range of areas.

“It will have applications in computing, measuring and diagnosing diseases, and processing materials - all areas where lasers are already used. It will also open up entirely new areas such as precision optical clocks for applications in metrology, ultrahigh-speed telecommunications, microchip computing and many other areas.”

This work by Dr Moss on the new laser continues his success in computing innovation, for which he won the 2011 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science.