Nanowerk December 30, 2020
A photonic wire laser (PWL) is a type of laser built on a semiconductor chip that has nanometer-sized bore and a millimeter length cavity. Coupling multiple adjacent PWLs can synchronize the light beams to emit at the same or multiple wavelengths and combine their power. A team of researchers in the US (MIT, Sandia National Laboratory) proposed and demonstrated a scheme to form a coupled cavity by taking advantage of this unique feature of photonic wire lasers. They used quantum cascade lasers with antenna-coupled third-order distributed feedback grating as the platform. Inspired by the chemistry of hybridization, the scheme phase-locks multiple such lasers by π coupling. With the coupled-cavity laser, they demonstrated several performance metrics that are important for various applications in sensing and imaging…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE