Fifteen years ago, UC Santa Barbara electrical and materials professor John Bowers pioneered a method for integrating a laser onto a silicon wafer. The technology has since been widely deployed in combination with other silicon ...
General Physics
Jul 1, 2021
4
181
Unlike the oscillations of sound waves, the oscillations of light are so fast that extremely complex equipment is needed to observe them directly. However, it is possible to measure the frequencies of these oscillations indirectly ...
Optics & Photonics
May 10, 2021
0
903
After the optical frequency comb made its debut as a ruler for light, spinoffs followed, including the astrocomb to measure starlight and a radar-like comb system to detect natural gas leaks. And now, researchers have unveiled ...
General Physics
Mar 31, 2021
0
55
You're going at the speed limit down a two-lane road when a car barrels out of a driveway on your right. You slam on the brakes, and within a fraction of a second of the impact an airbag inflates, saving you from serious ...
Optics & Photonics
Mar 8, 2021
1
3958
In 2017, astronomers witnessed the birth of a black hole for the first time. Gravitational wave detectors picked up the ripples in spacetime caused by two neutron stars colliding to form the black hole, and other telescopes ...
General Physics
Feb 16, 2021
5
359
Would you like to capture a chemical transformation inside a cell live? Or maybe revolutionize microchips' production by printing paths in a layer that has a thickness of just 100 nanometers? These and many other goals can ...
Optics & Photonics
Jan 11, 2021
1
61
Ordinary solid-state lasers, as used in laser pointers, generate light in the visible range. For many applications, however, such as the detection of molecules, radiation in the mid-infrared range is needed. Such infrared ...
Optics & Photonics
Nov 23, 2020
0
942
Our eyes are sensitive to only three spectral color bands (red, green, blue), and people can no longer distinguish colors if it becomes very dark. Spectroscopists can identify many more colors by the frequencies of the light ...
Optics & Photonics
Oct 20, 2020
1
1164
Researchers have developed a new approach that uses a single laser cavity to create two high-power optical frequency combs emitting high-power femtosecond pulses. The new development paves the way for portable dual-comb light ...
Optics & Photonics
Oct 15, 2020
0
129
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland have developed a microchip technology that can convert invisible near-infrared laser light into any one of a panoply ...
Optics & Photonics
Oct 14, 2020
0
56
