Latest Optical cavity Stories
Imagine navigating through a grocery store with your cell phone. As you turn down the bread aisle, ads and coupons for hot dog buns and English muffins pop up on your screen. The electronics industry would like to make such personal navigators a reality, but, to do so, they need the next generation of microsensors. Thanks to an ultrasensitive accelerometer—a type of motion detector—developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com -- Your Universe Online An international team of scientists has developed a laser with a frequency stability previously unequalled. This is the result of a research cooperation of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) within the scope of the Excellence Cluster QUEST (Centre for Quantum Engineering and Space-Time Research) with colleagues from the National Institute of Standards and Technology/JILA. Their development, published in the journal...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online A team of Northwestern University researchers have developed a laser that they claim creates the purest, brightest, and most powerful beam ever developed for use in standoff sensing applications. Manijeh Razeghi, a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the university's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and colleagues have crafted a new resonator that they believe will produce improved...
Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley researchers record first direct observations of quantum effects in an optomechanical system A long-time staple of science fiction is the tractor beam, a technology in which light is used to move massive objects – recall the tractor beam in the movie Star Wars that captured the Millennium Falcon and pulled it into the Death Star. While tractor beams of this sort remain science fiction, beams of light today are being used to mechanically manipulate atoms or...
Berkeley Lab Development Holds Promise for Nanolasers, LEDs, Optical Sensors and Photonic Communications The world’s smallest three-dimensional optical cavities with the potential to generate the world’s most intense nanolaser beams have been created by a scientific team led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley. In addition to nanolasers, these unique optical...
Existing coherent ultraviolet light sources are power hungry, bulky and expensive. University of Michigan researchers have found a better way to build compact ultraviolet sources with low power consumption that could improve information storage, microscopy and chemical analysis. A paper on the research is newly published in Optics Express. The research was led by Mona Jarrahi and Tal Carmon, assistant professors in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The...
Laser frequency combs—extraordinarily precise tools for measuring frequencies (or colors) of light—have helped propel advances in timekeeping, trace gas detection and related physics research to new heights in the past decade. While typical lasers operate at only a single or handful of frequencies, laser frequency combs operate simultaneously at many frequencies, approaching a million for some combs. These combs have very fine, evenly spaced "teeth," each a specific frequency, which can...
Natural cavities act like mirrors in light-emitting plasticsWhen University of Utah scientists discovered a new kind of laser that was generated by an electrically conducting plastic or polymer, no one could explain how it worked and some doubted it was real. Now, a decade later, the Utah researchers have found these "random lasers" occur because of natural, mirror-like cavities in the polymers, and they say such lasers may prove useful for diagnosing cancer."Nobody knew how it...
