Português

Scientists use glass to create femtosecond lasers

682
2023-09-28 17:12:33
Ver tradução

Image source: Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland

 

Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, September 27th (Reporter Zhang Jiaxin) Commercial femtosecond lasers are manufactured by placing optical components and their mounting bases on a substrate, which requires strict alignment of optical components. So, is it possible to manufacture femtosecond lasers entirely from glass? According to the latest issue of Optics magazine, scientists at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland have successfully achieved this, with lasers no larger than credit cards and easier to align.

Researchers stated that due to the lower thermal expansion of glass compared to traditional substrates, it is a stable material. Therefore, they chose glass as the substrate and used commercial femtosecond lasers to etch special grooves on the glass to accurately place the basic components of the laser. Even in precision manufacturing at the micron level, the grooves and components themselves are not precise enough to achieve laser quality alignment. In other words, the reflector is not fully aligned, so at this stage, their glass device cannot be used as a laser.

So, researchers further designed etching to position a mirror in a groove with micro mechanical bending, which can locally twist the mirror when irradiated by femtosecond laser. By aligning the mirror in this way, they ultimately created a stable, small-scale femtosecond laser.

Despite its small size, the peak power of the laser is about 1 kilowatt, and the time to emit pulses is less than 200 femtoseconds, which is so short that light cannot pass through human hair.

This method of permanently aligning free space optical components through laser material interaction can be extended to various optical circuits, with extreme alignment resolutions as low as sub nanometer level.

 

Reprinted from:LDWORLD

Recomendações relacionadas
  • Breaking the limits of optical imaging by processing trillions of frames per second

    Pursuing higher speed is not just exclusive to athletes. Researchers can also achieve such feats through their findings. The research results of Professor Liang Jinyang and his team from the National Institute of Science (INRS) have recently been published in the journal Nature Communications.The team located at the INRS É nergie Mat é riaux T é l é communications resea...

    2024-04-08
    Ver tradução
  • A new approach to 3D printing has been published in a Nature journal

    In the last century, the improvement of mechanical properties of structural metals was mainly achieved through the creation of increasingly complex chemical compositions. The complexity of this ingredient increases costs, creates supply fragility, and makes recycling more complex.As a relatively new metal processing technology, metal 3D printing provides the possibility to re-examine and simplify ...

    2024-11-29
    Ver tradução
  • Research Progress: Extreme Ultraviolet Photolithography

    Recently, the semiconductor industry has adopted Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUVL) technology. This cutting-edge photolithography technology is used for the continuous miniaturization of semiconductor devices to comply with Moore's Law. Extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) has become a key technology that utilizes shorter wavelengths to achieve nanoscale feature sizes with higher accuracy a...

    2024-12-09
    Ver tradução
  • Scientists demonstrate a new optical neural network training method that can crush electronic microprocessors

    The current deep neural network system (such as ChatGPT) can quickly improve energy efficiency by 100 times in training, and "future improvements will greatly increase by several orders of magnitude. Scientists from MIT and other institutions have demonstrated a new optical neural network training method that can crush state-of-the-art electronic microprocessors.Moreover, the computational density...

    2023-09-27
    Ver tradução
  • New progress in in-situ identification and quantitative research of methane carbon isotopes in the ocean

    Recently, Zhang Xin's research team from the Institute of Oceanography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, based on the in-situ laser Raman spectroscopy technology, made new progress in the in-situ recognition and quantification of methane carbon isotopes by using the significant differences in the Raman spectra of methane carbon isotopes (13CH4 and 12CH4). The relevant results were recently published i...

    2023-10-13
    Ver tradução