Ultrafast lasers tagged posts

Research appearing in ACS Nano reveals the ballistic movement of electrons in graphene in real-time.

The observations made at the University of Kansas’ Ultrafast Laser Lab could lead to breakthroughs in governing electrons in semiconductors, fundamental components in most information and energy technology.

“Generally, electron movement is interrupted by collisions with other particles in solids,” said lead author Ryan Scott, a doctoral student in KU’s Department of Physics & Astronomy.

“This is similar to someone running in a ballroom full of dancers. These collisions are rather frequent—about 10 to 100 billion times per second. They slow down the electrons, cause energy loss, and generate unwanted heat...

Lasers are essential tools for observing, detecting, and measuring things in the natural world that we can’t see with the naked eye. But the ability to perform these tasks is often restricted by the need to use expensive and large instruments.

In a newly published cover-story paper in the journal Science, researcher Qiushi Guo demonstrates a novel approach for creating high-performance ultrafast lasers on nanophotonic chips. His work centers on miniaturizing mode-lock lasers—a unique laser that emits a train of ultrashort, coherent light pulses in femtosecond intervals, which is an astonishing quadrillionth of a second.

Ultrafast mode-locked lasers are indispensable to unlocking ...