Using our technology, this kind of imaging could happen dramatically faster. “Probing biological samples with ultrafast pulses provides both imaging and chemical makeup information. “Chemical and biological imaging is a good example of the applications for this type of laser,” Papp says. So that’s the speedup here- ultrafast pulses that arrive 100 times faster or more.” In our electro-optic laser, the pulses come out every 100 picoseconds. “In mode-locked lasers, the pulses come out every 10 nanoseconds. “In any ultrafast laser, each pulse lasts for, say, 20 femtoseconds,” lead author David Carlson says. In contrast, NIST’s new electro-optic laser imposes microwave electronic vibrations on a continuous-wave laser operating at optical frequencies, effectively carving pulses into the light. Interoperation of optical and microwave signals powers the latest advances in communications, time keeping, and quantum sensing systems. Combs are usually made with sophisticated “mode-locked” lasers, which form pulses from many different colors of light waves that overlap, creating links between optical and microwave frequencies. The conventional source of ultrafast light is an optical frequency comb, a precise “ruler” for light. The vertical backdrop shows how these colors combine to create an optical frequency comb, or “ruler” for light. Illustration depicting how specific frequencies, or colors, of light (sharp peaks) emerge from the electronic background noise (blue) in NIST’s ultrafast electro-optic laser. This is faster than the nanoscale regime, introduced to the cultural lexicon some years ago with the field of nanotechnology (nanoseconds are billionths of a second).

Ultrafast refers to events lasting picoseconds (trillionths of a second) to femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second). “We tamed the light with an aluminum can,” project leader Scott Papp says, referring to the “cavity” in which the electronic signals are stabilized and filtered.Īs the signals bounce back and forth inside something like a soda can, fixed waves emerge at the strongest frequencies and block or filter out other frequencies. 28 issue of Science, NIST scientists developed a filtering method to reduce the heat-induced interference that otherwise would ruin the consistency of electronically synthesized light. But until now researchers have been unable to electronically switch light to make ultrafast pulses and eliminate electronic noise, or interference.Īs described in the Sept.

The technology for making electro-optic lasers has been around for five decades, and the idea seems alluringly simple. The advance could extend the benefits of ultrafast science to new applications such as imaging of biological materials in real time. Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used common electronics to build a laser that pulses 100 times more often than conventional ultrafast lasers.

Laser pulse faster than light