Nanoscale lasers continue to shrink, heralding new era in optical science

Breakthroughs are coming thick and fast – or should that be thin and fast – in the field of nanoscale lasers. It wasn’t even a month ago that we reported on the development of a laser emitting ‘metal-semiconductor-metal sandwich’, made up of a semiconductor as thin as 80 nanometers laying between 20-nanometer dielectric layers. But now researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have reached a new milestone in laser physics by creating the world’s smallest semiconductor laser, capable of generating visible light in a space smaller than a single protein molecule.

The researchers say their breakthrough marks a major advance toward applications in the biomedical, communications and computing fields. These include the development of nanolasers that can probe, manipulate and characterize DNA molecules; optics-based telecommunications many times faster than current technology; and optical computing in which light replaces electronic circuitry with a corresponding leap in speed and processing power, but with greater power efficiency.

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Tags: biomedical communications, dna molecules, electronic circuitry, Innovation, laser physics, lasers, leap, milestone, nanometer, nanometers, new era, optical computing, optical science, power efficiency, protein molecule, semiconductor laser, university of california berkeley, visible light

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 9:14 pm and is filed under Communications, Cutting-edge Research, Innovation, gizmag. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.