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A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. The word laser is an anacronym that originated as an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. The first laser was built in 1960 by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories, based on theoretical work by Charles H. Townes and Arthur Leonard Schawlow.
An optical amplifier is a device that amplifies an optical signal directly, without the need to first convert it to an electrical signal. An optical amplifier may be thought of as a laser without an optical cavity, or one in which feedback from the cavity is suppressed. Optical amplifiers are important in optical communication and laser physics. They are used as optical repeaters in the long distance fiber-optic cables which carry much of the world's telecommunication links.
A laser diode is a semiconductor device similar to a light-emitting diode in which a diode pumped directly with electrical current can create lasing conditions at the diode's junction.
The vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser is a type of semiconductor laser diode with laser beam emission perpendicular from the top surface, contrary to conventional edge-emitting semiconductor lasers which emit from surfaces formed by cleaving the individual chip out of a wafer. VCSELs are used in various laser products, including computer mice, fiber optic communications, laser printers, Face ID, and smartglasses.
Quantum dots (QDs) or semiconductor nanocrystals are semiconductor particles a few nanometres in size with optical and electronic properties that differ from those of larger particles via quantum mechanical effects. They are a central topic in nanotechnology and materials science. When a quantum dot is illuminated by UV light, an electron in the quantum dot can be excited to a state of higher energy. In the case of a semiconducting quantum dot, this process corresponds to the transition of an electron from the valence band to the conductance band. The excited electron can drop back into the valence band releasing its energy as light. This light emission (photoluminescence) is illustrated in the figure on the right. The color of that light depends on the energy difference between the conductance band and the valence band, or the transition between discrete energy states when the band structure is no longer well-defined in QDs.
A tunable laser is a laser whose wavelength of operation can be altered in a controlled manner. While all laser gain media allow small shifts in output wavelength, only a few types of lasers allow continuous tuning over a significant wavelength range.
A blue laser emits electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength between 400 and 500 nanometers, which the human eye sees in the visible spectrum as blue or violet.
A hybrid silicon laser is a semiconductor laser fabricated from both silicon and group III-V semiconductor materials. The hybrid silicon laser was developed to address the lack of a silicon laser to enable fabrication of low-cost, mass-producible silicon optical devices. The hybrid approach takes advantage of the light-emitting properties of III-V semiconductor materials combined with the process maturity of silicon to fabricate electrically driven lasers on a silicon wafer that can be integrated with other silicon photonic devices.
A distributed-feedback laser (DFB) is a type of laser diode, quantum-cascade laser or optical-fiber laser where the active region of the device contains a periodically structured element or diffraction grating. The structure builds a one-dimensional interference grating, and the grating provides optical feedback for the laser. This longitudinal diffraction grating has periodic changes in refractive index that cause reflection back into the cavity. The periodic change can be either in the real part of the refractive index or in the imaginary part. The strongest grating operates in the first order, where the periodicity is one-half wave, and the light is reflected backwards. DFB lasers tend to be much more stable than Fabry–Perot or DBR lasers and are used frequently when clean single-mode operation is needed, especially in high-speed fiber-optic telecommunications. Semiconductor DFB lasers in the lowest loss window of optical fibers at about 1.55 μm wavelength, amplified by erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), dominate the long-distance communication market, while DFB lasers in the lowest dispersion window at 1.3 μm are used at shorter distances.
Mesoscopic physics is a subdiscipline of condensed matter physics that deals with materials of an intermediate size. These materials range in size between the nanoscale for a quantity of atoms and of materials measuring micrometres. The lower limit can also be defined as being the size of individual atoms. At the microscopic scale are bulk materials. Both mesoscopic and macroscopic objects contain many atoms. Whereas average properties derived from constituent materials describe macroscopic objects, as they usually obey the laws of classical mechanics, a mesoscopic object, by contrast, is affected by thermal fluctuations around the average, and its electronic behavior may require modeling at the level of quantum mechanics.
A quantum-well laser is a laser diode in which the active region of the device is so narrow that quantum confinement occurs. Laser diodes are formed in compound semiconductor materials that are able to emit light efficiently. The wavelength of the light emitted by a quantum-well laser is determined by the width of the active region rather than just the bandgap of the materials from which it is constructed. This means that much shorter wavelengths can be obtained from quantum-well lasers than from conventional laser diodes using a particular semiconductor material. The efficiency of a quantum-well laser is also greater than a conventional laser diode due to the stepwise form of its density of states function.
A nanolaser is a laser that has nanoscale dimensions and it refers to a micro-/nano- device which can emit light with light or electric excitation of nanowires or other nanomaterials that serve as resonators. A standard feature of nanolasers includes their light confinement on a scale approaching or suppressing the diffraction limit of light. These tiny lasers can be modulated quickly and, combined with their small footprint, this makes them ideal candidates for on-chip optical computing.
A superluminescent diode is an edge-emitting semiconductor light source based on superluminescence. It combines the high power and brightness of laser diodes with the low coherence of conventional light-emitting diodes. Its emission optical bandwidth, also described as full-width at half maximum, can range from 5 up to 750 nm.
Core–shell semiconducting nanocrystals (CSSNCs) are a class of materials which have properties intermediate between those of small, individual molecules and those of bulk, crystalline semiconductors. They are unique because of their easily modular properties, which are a result of their size. These nanocrystals are composed of a quantum dot semiconducting core material and a shell of a distinct semiconducting material. The core and the shell are typically composed of type II–VI, IV–VI, and III–V semiconductors, with configurations such as CdS/ZnS, CdSe/ZnS, CdSe/CdS, and InAs/CdSe Organically passivated quantum dots have low fluorescence quantum yield due to surface related trap states. CSSNCs address this problem because the shell increases quantum yield by passivating the surface trap states. In addition, the shell provides protection against environmental changes, photo-oxidative degradation, and provides another route for modularity. Precise control of the size, shape, and composition of both the core and the shell enable the emission wavelength to be tuned over a wider range of wavelengths than with either individual semiconductor. These materials have found applications in biological systems and optics.
Blinking colloidal nanocrystals is a phenomenon observed during studies of single colloidal nanocrystals that show that they randomly turn their photoluminescence on and off even under continuous light illumination. This has also been described as luminescence intermittency. Similar behavior has been observed in crystals made of other materials. For example, porous silicon also exhibits this affect.
Interband cascade lasers (ICLs) are a type of laser diode that can produce coherent radiation over a large part of the mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. They are fabricated from epitaxially-grown semiconductor heterostructures composed of layers of indium arsenide (InAs), gallium antimonide (GaSb), aluminum antimonide (AlSb), and related alloys. These lasers are similar to quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) in several ways. Like QCLs, ICLs employ the concept of bandstructure engineering to achieve an optimized laser design and reuse injected electrons to emit multiple photons. However, in ICLs, photons are generated with interband transitions, rather than the intersubband transitions used in QCLs. Consequently, the rate at which the carriers injected into the upper laser subband thermally relax to the lower subband is determined by interband Auger, radiative, and Shockley-Read carrier recombination. These processes typically occur on a much slower time scale than the longitudinal optical phonon interactions that mediates the intersubband relaxation of injected electrons in mid-IR QCLs. The use of interband transitions allows laser action in ICLs to be achieved at lower electrical input powers than is possible with QCLs.
Ortwin Hess is a German-born theoretical physicist at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) and Imperial College London (UK), working in condensed matter optics. Bridging condensed matter theory and quantum optics he specialises in quantum nanophotonics, plasmonics, metamaterials and semiconductor laser dynamics. Since the late 1980s he has been an author and coauthor of over 300 peer-reviewed articles, the most popular of which, called "'Trapped rainbow' storage of light in metamaterials", was cited more than 400 times. He pioneered active nanoplasmonics and metamaterials with quantum gain and in 2014 he introduced the "stopped-light lasing" principle as a novel route to cavity-free (nano-) lasing and localisation of amplified surface plasmon polaritons, giving him an h-index of 33.
Quantum dots (QDs) are semiconductor nanoparticles with a size less than 10 nm. They exhibited size-dependent properties especially in the optical absorption and the photoluminescence (PL). Typically, the fluorescence emission peak of the QDs can be tuned by changing their diameters. So far, QDs were consisted of different group elements such as CdTe, CdSe, CdS in the II-VI category, InP or InAs in the III-V category, CuInS2 or AgInS2 in the I–III–VI2 category, and PbSe/PbS in the IV-VI category. These QDs are promising candidates as fluorescent labels in various biological applications such as bioimaging, biosensing and drug delivery.
Perovskite nanocrystals are a class of semiconductor nanocrystals, which exhibit unique characteristics that separate them from traditional quantum dots. Perovskite nanocrystals have an ABX3 composition where A = cesium, methylammonium (MA), or formamidinium (FA); B = lead or tin; and X = chloride, bromide, or iodide.
Efrat Lifshitz is an Israeli chemist at the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry and the Solid-State Institute, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (Technion-IIT). Lifshitz's research is known for pioneering advances in developing and studying low-dimensional semiconductors by exploring the relationship between their optical properties and magnetism.
References
- ↑ "Fujitsu, University of Tokyo Develop World's First 10Gbps Quantum Dot Laser Featuring Breakthrough Temperature-Independent Output - Fujitsu Global".
- ↑ Melnychuk, C.; Guyot-Sionnest, P.;"Multicarrier Dynamics in Quantum Dots". Chemical Reviews, 121, 4, 2021, p 2325. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrev.0c00931
- ↑ "Quantum dot laser technology".
- ↑ "Comb laser | Optical Frequency Combs".
- ↑ Park, Young-Shin; Roh, Jeongkyun; Diroll, Benjamin T.; Schaller, Richard D.; Klimov, Victor I. (May 2021). "Colloidal quantum dot lasers". Nature Reviews Materials. 6 (5): 382–401. Bibcode:2021NatRM...6..382P. doi:10.1038/s41578-020-00274-9. OSTI 1864315. S2CID 231931231.
- ↑ Kagan, Cherie R.; Bassett, Lee C.; Murray, Christopher B.; Thompson, Sarah M. (10 March 2021). "Colloidal Quantum Dots as Platforms for Quantum Information Science". Chemical Reviews. 121 (5): 3186–3233. doi:10.1021/acs.chemrev.0c00831. PMID 33372773. S2CID 229715753.
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