According to foreign media reports, a team of researchers from Massachusetts institute of technology has created the purest laser in the world.
The device is portable enough to be used in space. It produces a lasaer pointer beam that changes less over time than any other laser.
Normally, temperature changes and other environmental factors cause the laser beam to oscillate between different wavelengths. The researchers call this swing “line width,” expressed in Hertz or cycles per second. Whereas other high-end lasers typically have a line width of 1,000 to 10,000 Hertz, this laser has a line width of 20 Hertz.
To achieve this extreme purity, the researchers used 6.6ft (2m) of optical fibre, which is known to produce very low width laser beams. They then further improved the line width by having the laser continually check the current wavelength against the past and correct any errors that occurred.
The researchers say the creation is significant because the high line width is one of the sources of error for precision devices that rely on laser beams. High-line-wide atomic clocks or gravitational wave detectors do not produce signals as good as those produced by their low-line-wide counterparts, confusing the data produced by the devices.
In addition, researchers are working to further miniaturize the device, which could one day be used to build larger, more accurate gravitational wave detectors.