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Lasers, chaos, and bow-ties

Sep 1, 1998

Since the invention of the laser nearly 40 years ago, there has been an inexorable trend towards creating devices that are smaller, more efficient and tunable over a wider range of wavelengths. This has been achieved through continuous improvements in the three principal building blocks of the laser - an active medium that provides amplification, a pump that serves as the source of energy and a resonator that provides feedback. In the latest advance, researchers from Lucent Technologies and Yale University in the US, and the Max Planck Institute for the physics of complex systems in Dresden, Germany, have tackled the limitations imposed by laser resonators in a fresh and effective way (C Gmachl et al. 1998 Science 280 1556). They have obtained strong beams of laser light from microdisk lasers, which were previously only able to produce weak laser emission.

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