FOCUS RESEARCH NEWS
A step towards perfect control of light waves
A team at the Laboratory for Attosecond Physics at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Germany has developed a glass-based detector that can determine the form of light waves that make up an individual femtosecond pulse. The research, published in January’s issue of
journal Nature Photonics, will allow researchers to generate light flashes that are a thousand times shorter, to study ultrafast processes at the molecular and atomic levels. In the course of experiments performed over the past several years, together with colleagues based at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Technical University of Munich, physicists have learned that, when pulsed high-intensity laser light impinges on glass, it induces measurable amounts of electric current in the material.
The glass detector created by the team is able to measure the flow of electric current between two electrodes when the
Tim Paasch-Colberg with a mode-locked laser at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics
electromagnetic field associated with the laser pulse impinges on the glass. The researchers can then deduce the precise waveform of the pulse from the properties of the induced current.
If the precise waveform of the femtosecond laser pulse is known, it will become possible to reproducibly generate stable trains of ultrashort attosecond light flashes – which are highly dependent on the exact shape of the femtosecond pulse.
World’s most powerful terahertz laser chip developed
University of Leeds researchers have built the world’s most powerful terahertz laser chip. The Institution of Engineering and Technology’s (IET) journal Electronics Letters reports that the team has exceeded a 1W output power from a quantum cascade terahertz laser. The new record more than doubles the
landmark set by a team from Vienna last year. Widely publicised potential applications of terahertz waves include monitoring pharmaceutical products, remote sensing of chemical signatures of explosives in unopened envelopes, and the non-invasive detection of cancers in the human body. However, one of the main challenges for scientists and engineers is making the lasers powerful and compact enough to be useful. Professor Edmund Linfield, Professor of
Terahertz Electronics in the University’s School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, said: ‘Although it is possible to build large instruments that generate powerful beams of terahertz radiation, these instruments are only useful for a limited set of applications. We need terahertz lasers that not only offer high-power but are also portable and low-cost.’
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