With a single leap from tabletop to the microscale, engineers have produced the world's first practical Titanium-sapphire laser on a chip, democratizing a once-exclusive technology.
"This is a complete departure from the old model," said Jelena Vu?kovi?, the Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership, a professor of electrical engineering, and senior author of the paper introducing the chip-scale Ti:sapphire laser published in the journal."Instead of one large and expensive laser, any lab might soon have hundreds of these valuable lasers on a single chip. And you can fuel it all with a green laser pointer.
"A chip is light. It is portable. It is inexpensive and it is efficient. There are no moving parts. And it can be mass-produced," Yang said."What's not to like? This democratizes Ti:sapphire lasers."To fashion the new laser, the researchers began with a bulk layer of Titanium-sapphire on a platform of silicon dioxide , all riding atop true sapphire crystal. They then grind, etch, and polish the Ti:sapphire to an extremely thin layer, just a few hundred nanometers thick.
Next up, the team is working on perfecting their chip-scale Ti:sapphire laser and on ways to mass-produce them, thousands at a time, on wafers. Yang will earn his doctorate this summer based on this research and is working to bring the technology to market.
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