Nanowerk November 10, 2023 Mode-locked lasers (MLLs) generate ultrashort pulses with peak powers substantially exceeding their average powers. However, integrated MLLs that drive ultrafast nanophotonic circuits have remained elusive because of their typically low peak powers, lack of controllability, and challenges when integrating with nanophotonic platforms. Researchers at CalTech demonstrated an electrically pumped actively MLL in nanophotonic lithium niobate based on its hybrid integration with a III-V semiconductor optical amplifier. It generated 4.8-ps optical pulses around 1065 nm at a repetition rate of ∼10 GHz, with energies exceeding 2.6 pJ and peak powers beyond 0.5 W. The repetition rate and […]
Tag Archives: Frequency combs
Brighter comb lasers on a chip mean new applications
Phys.org August 29, 2023 While conventional optical frequency combs are generated using mode-locked lasers that tend to be constrained to high-end scientific laboratories, there has been recent work to develop optical frequency combs using compact, chip-scale microresonators based on dissipative Kerr solitons (DKSs) which consume very little energy, they also do not produce enough output power to be useful. A team of researchers in the US (NIST, University of Maryland) harnessed the newly proposed Kerr-induced synchronization of Kerr solitons to an external stable laser reference to produce optical frequency combs with substantial increase of power on the other side of […]
Microresonators offer a simpler approach to sensing with light pulses
Science Daily October 1, 2018 An international team of researchers (Switzerland, Russia) has developed a simpler method to generate multiple frequency combs using optical microresonators consisting of a crystalline disk a few millimeters in diameter. At every round, a part of the soliton exits the resonator, producing a stream of optical pulses. It allows the light to travel in the disk in spatial modes of the resonator. In this way, they were able to generate up to three frequency combs at the same time. Using multiplexing scheme, the team demonstrated several applications, such as dual-comb spectroscopy, and rapid optical sampling…read […]