Tiniest Telecommunications Laser Ever Made, 200 Nanometers Wide

By Rebecca Boyle Posted 02.09.2012 at 11:52 am 6 Comments

Smallest Telecommunications Laser A scanning electron micrograph image shows the constituent ring of the coaxial structure of the tiny laser, containing the gain section and the cover silica layer. Mercedeh Khajavikhan and Aleksandar Simic

Lasers are getting smaller and more powerful — earlier this month, we saw the first-ever atomic scale laser, and now researchers are reporting the smallest telecommunications-frequency laser ever built. The laser is one-fifteenth the size of the light waves it can produce, and it works at room temperature.

Small lasers that produce wavelengths of light larger than themselves could be used to explore the fundamentals of quantum electrodynamics, and they could also have practical uses, including chip-based optical communications and ultra-high-resolution imaging. Lasers can transmit information faster than traditional semiconductors, and they might be more practical than quantum computers (if those are even a possibility).

These new lasers are an efficient step in that direction because they don’t require a high threshold to start lasing. They could even be designed to remove the threshold entirely.

A laser threshold is the energy level beyond which a laser’s power increases rapidly. When the laser cavity — the place where light waves are amplified — is very small, the threshold energy must be very high, but a lot of this input energy is wasted. This makes the tiniest lasers impractical. To get beyond this limitation, Mercedeh Khajavikhan and colleagues at the University of California-San Diego used a cylindrical co-axial arrangement — co-axial as in the type of cable that runs from your wall to the TV. Khajavikhan and colleagues built nanoscale lasers whose co-axial arrangement allowed them to capture all the energy of the larger laser that was used to pump them up, a huge improvement in efficiency.

“These nanoscale resonators should provide a powerful platform for the development of other QED devices and metamaterials in which atom–field interactions generate new functionalities,” the authors write. Their paper was published in Nature.

[via BBC]

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6 Comments

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Eric18

02/09/12 at 12:40 pm

What can this do for resolution imaging, they mention it could provide ultra-high-resolution imaging but how? would it be better than AMOLED or OLED???

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xalar

02/09/12 at 1:06 pm

Can the laser device be inverted so it can pick up a light for image capture?

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Lord Elliot the...

02/09/12 at 11:56 pm

How does one make a laser smaller than it's wavelength?
-Spouting a fountain of nonsense since 1995-

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adaptation

02/11/12 at 2:42 pm

Lord Elliot the Idiot. It is acting more like an antenna than a traditional laser. It is very common for antennas to be smaller than the wavelength they transmit.

Xalar, It will work very well if you need 600THz AC power, but you'd better use it really close, the miniscule capacitance of gold or copper will attenuate (absorb) your power rather quickly. Converting that super ultra mega high frequency electricity to something more useful may prove difficult.

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GregN913

02/18/12 at 2:35 pm

Eric18, I would imagine that these lasers could be used for some form of interference holography to determine structural changes on a microscopic level (non-destructive tolerance testing). What is really exciting about this device is that it is physically smaller than the wavelength of light that it emits. There could be a first for a holographic interferrogram in which the emitting device is actually smaller than the interference patterns (1 wavelength) being measured. This would have wide use of applications for the biomedical and precision manufacturing worlds where it would be impractical to place a meter long laser next to the thing you are trying to measure.
I don't know if that is the answer you are looking for, but it was the first thing that popped into my mind when I read about this.

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