Nanowerk June 26, 2024
Ti:sapphire lasers are unmatched in bandwidth and tuning range, yet their use is restricted because of their large size, cost and need for high optical pump powers. An international team of researchers (USA – Stanford University, Belgium) demonstrated a monocrystalline titanium:sapphire-on-insulator (Ti:SaOI) photonics platform that enabled dramatic miniaturization, cost reduction and scalability of Ti:sapphire technology. Through the fabrication of low-loss whispering-gallery-mode resonators, they realized a Ti:sapphire laser operating with an ultralow, sub-milliwatt lasing threshold; through orders-of-magnitude improvement in mode confinement in Ti:SaOI waveguides, they realized an integrated solid-state optical amplifier operating below 1 μm. They amplified distortion-free picosecond pulses to peak powers, and demonstrated a tunable integrated Ti:sapphire laser. According to the researchers their work opens the doors to new modalities of Ti:sapphire lasers, three-orders-of-magnitude reduction in cost and footprint and solid-state broadband amplification of sub-micron wavelength light… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Low-loss photonics and sub-milliwatt threshold … Credit: Nature volume 630, pages 853–859, 26 June 2024