In the entire laser industry chain, lasers can be said to be the most technologically-content link, and they are also the basis for all laser pointer applications. It is based on this that the research and development of lasers has always attracted many teams of scientists. With the development of laser materials and the maturity of laser theory, the development of lasers has also progressed rapidly, ranging from industrial-grade high-power lasers to micron-level micro-biological lasers. Scientists in the field of lasers bring forth new innovations and continuous achievements. The following editor will take stock of the latest research and development results in the field of lasers.
Glass bottle-shaped micro laser. Scientists from the Optical Matter Interaction Group of the Graduate School of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have discovered that a doughnut-shaped or spherical device made of glass doped with rare earth elements such as erbium or ytterbium can be used to create a special type of glass micro-laser . In the micro laser, the light is repeatedly reflected, thereby generating a light path of 10 meters to 100 meters in a micro device the size of a grain of sand.
In addition, by using the different melting points of erbium or ytterbium or silica phosphate glass, scientists have developed a method for producing micro lasers through glass wetting or glass-to-glass preparation methods. This method produces bottle-shaped micro lasers. , The diameter is 170 microns.
The miniature laser generated by this method can be used to measure the air flow of microfluidic devices. It is more sensitive than traditional commercial electronic flow sensors and is 1000 times smaller in size. The silicon material quantum cascade laser comes from researchers from the University of California, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and it is the first time to build a quantum cascade green laser pointer on silicon material.
The indirect band gap of silicon makes it very difficult to construct lasers, but III-V semiconductor materials, such as indium phosphide (InP) or gallium arsenide (GaAa), can be used to construct diode lasers. By directly attaching the III-V layer to the silicon wafer, the III-V layer is used to form the laser gain, and the same combination is integrated to form a 2μm multi-quantum well laser on the silicon material. The limitations of diode lasers make it difficult to generate longer wavelengths, so the research team turned to QCLs instead.