Laser Technology

On-chip ultrafast laser design The laser is essentially constructed from a piece of erbium-doped silicon nitride waveguide sandwiched between two Bragg gratings, pumped with (currently) off-chip 1480-nm continuous-wave diodes. “Using the Mamyshev oscillator concept, the two gratings are deliberately offset in wavelength so continuous-wave lasing can’t be sustained,” explains Qiu. “No single wavelength is reflected […]

In this second of a two-part series featuring Giacomo Vacca, founder/president/CEO of Kinetic River, he talks with host Justine Murphy about the biophotonics-centric company, its history, and innovations, as well as what they’re working on now, what the future holds, and Kinetic River’s place in it. Following the Photons: A Photonics Podcast dives deep into

Using optical fiber as on-chip waveguides results in ultralow signal loss comparable to that of optical fiber at visible wavelengths. “For decades, optical fiber has achieved extraordinarily low propagation loss using germanium-doped silica,” says postdoctoral scholar Hao-Jing Chen, who co-led the research with Kellan Colburn, a Ph.D. student. But PICs have struggled to reach comparable

In this episode of Photonics Hot List: Conventional optical encryption systems that rely on commercial detectors to capture images are vulnerable. But now, researchers at the University of Hong Kong are developing technology that doubles as a decryption key. Business news roundup: Light Conversion is strengthening its global position in the advanced ultrafast technology market

Spin-orbit interactions of light Spin-orbit interactions of light “are usually associated with tight focusing, interfaces, anisotropic media, or nanostructures,” says Forbes. “In these cases, the spin and orbital degrees of freedom become coupled because the beam interacts strongly with a lens, a surface, or a material.” One surprising part for the team was seeing a

In an advance for photonic integrated circuits (PICs), Stéphane Kéna-Cohen and his team at Polytechnique Montréal in Canada recently fabricated waveguides for frequency doubling using an organic thin film—based on triphenylamine-dicyanoquinoxaline, a.k.a. TPA-QCN—that strongly interacts with light. This class of materials may help lessen AI’s energy load on data centers because it can be placed

In this episode of Photonics Hot List: A new optical sensor, about as small as a grain of rice, is poised to upend traditional electronics with its ability to detect and measure physical motion, potentially advancing robotic and medical devices via light. A Silicon Valley chip foundry is expanding its presence in photonics with the

LFW: What advantages does optical compute offer that currently available compute infrastructure doesn’t? Steinman: Optical compute is well suited to accelerate mathematical operations central to AI and scientific workloads, particularly linear operations such as vector-matrix multiplication. Our PACE 2 platform, for example, uses a 128 × 128 configurable optical matrix multiplier and a heterogeneous optoelectronic

CN center: A more robust silicon defect Our team identified a promising alternative to the T center: the CN center, which consists of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) atoms (see Fig. 2, right). The CN center is chemically similar to the T center because N has the same number of protons and electrons as C+H.

This edition features Yvain Thonnart, a chief scientist in the digital integrated circuits and systems division of the French research institute CEA-List, where he focuses on areas including networks-on-chip and integrating emerging photonics technologies. He talked recently with host Justine Murphy about his work at CEA, and his team’s potentially gamechanging development of the first