Laser capable of emitting light quiet enough to move demanding scientific applications

Science Daily  February 1, 2019 Under a DARPA sponsored initiative an international team of researcher (USA – UC Santa Barbara, industry partners, Northern Arizona University, Yale University, Portugal) has developed a chip-scale laser capable of emitting light with a fundamental linewidth of less than 1 Hz. They leveraged stimulated Brillouin scattering to build the lasers. The circuits were built with waveguides that are extremely low loss. They formed into a Brillouin laser ring cavity on the chip. They can store an extremely large number of photons on the chip, handle extremely high levels of optical power inside the optical cavity […]

Optical gyroscopes the size of a grain of rice and with higher precision

Next Big Future  October 10, 2018 Optical gyros have been difficult to scale down because, as they shrink, the signal from their sensors weakens and is then drowned in noise created in part by scattered light. Researchers at Caltech have developed a proof-of-concept device that is capable of detecting phase shifts 30 times smaller than state-of-the-art miniature fibre-optic gyroscopes, despite being 500 times smaller in size. Their approach can enhance the performance of optical gyroscopes by one to two orders of magnitude. Such gyroscopes are great candidates for miniaturization onto nanophotonic platforms…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE