Is putting carbon free laser-driven fusion energy on the grid by the 2030s possible? It depends largely on public-private partnerships, funding, and efforts to improve the U.S. National Ignition Facility's laser shot rate and its repetition rate.
A new type of surface-emitting laser reduces complexity compared to traditional vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser approaches, thanks to nanoridges and lasing that stems from a photonic crystal cavity rather than thick distributed Bragg reflector mirror stacks.
Case study: MKS Ophir's high-speed M-2 beam measurement device boosts laser manufacturing quality for Bloom Lasers.
Traditional lenses made of germanium tend to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars and can't be repaired when damaged but a lower-cost sulfur polymer lens option is about to become a gamechanger for infrared (IR) thermal imaging cameras because it can be mass produced, repaired, and recycled.
Microlenses inside optical cavities allow physicists to tightly focus light onto single atoms in a way that's both efficient and massively parallel-and it looks promising for building faster distributed quantum computers.
Quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) are powerful mid-infrared (MIR) light sources for gas sensing, but factors such as manufacturing complexity, efficiency, system integration, and portability have limited their adoption for gas sensing systems so far.
Crystalline oxide passivation extends facet stability for weeks or months-without molecular beam epitaxy or in situ coatings.
Thermoelectric coolers provide precision temperature control for lasers, detectors, and integrated photonics-where addressing thermal drift at the device level is essential.
A novel Fabry-Perot cavity incorporating a holographic phase mask demonstrates resonance free operation by driving an unrestricted orbital-angular-momentum ladder-up process, which enables broadband transmission from a high-Q cavity.
An international team of researchers demonstrates single-shot tensor computing at the speed of light and opens the door to next-gen AI hardware powered by optical computation.
Researchers move a step closer to femtosecond switching of 'light by light' for photonic computing based on polaritons.
Researchers apply the precision of optical frequency combs to radio telescopes to synchronize the observation timing and phase of faint cosmic signals and lay the foundation for multiple distant radio telescopes to operate as a single giant telescope.
How can we unlock the full potential of optical networks? Critical innovations are emerging, but closing technical, commercial, and operational gaps will require focused industry collaboration and forward-thinking strategy from all parties.
Purdue University researchers demonstrate a photonic transistor at single-photon intensities-and solve a long-standing roadblock to photonic computing.
The quest for ultracompact light-based chips just got a much-needed momentum boost, thanks to a two-step excitation method that pushes polaritons beyond the conventional limitations of far-field optics.
The growing demand for high-bandwidth, energy-efficient optical transceivers has accelerated interest in heterogeneous integration of III-V semiconductors on silicon-pairing high-performance light sources with the scalability of silicon photonics.
By leveraging tunable diode lasers and a synergetic combination of public and private investments and partnerships, the industry can speed development and adoption of photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technologies for the emerging quantum market.
Scaling "up and out" is driving a wave of innovation in quantum photonics because the interplay between qubit platforms and photonic integration is central to system design.
AI, quantum computing, and ultralow-power networking are poised to transform the technology ecosystem, and barium titanate offers a pathway to industrial scalability.
A new nonlinear metasurface retains nonlocal, high-Q enhancement while preserving subwavelength per-pixel phase control-and it's a big step toward on-chip visible/ultraviolet light sources, LiDAR beam steering, quantum light generation, optical signal processing, and polarization-encoded computing.
