Breaking barriers with nanoscale lasers( TEMPE Ariz. We could soon see the p...)

TEMPE, Ariz. We could soon see the potential of laser technology expand dramatically.

Ways to make lasers smaller are being discovered through collaborative efforts of researchers at Arizona State University and Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. The work opens up possibilities for using nanoscale lasers to significantly improve the performance of computers and speed up Internet access .

The teams' advances in breaking through previous limitations on how small lasers can be made are reported in a recent edition of the online science and engineering journal Optics Express.

Authors of the report include professor Martin Hill, who leads the Eindhoven team, and ASU team leader Cun-Zheng Ning, a professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering in ASU's Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

Lasers once were the stuff largely of science fiction. Today they are everywhere in the world of electronics. They are essential components of CD and DVD players. They are used in the automatic check-out stations in supermarkets.

Small lasers are used in technology that enables communications across continents, and soon nanolasers will be used for communications between the parts inside your computer.

Engineers have been trying to make lasers smaller because it would enable the devices to be more effectively integrated with small electronics components. The more lasers that can be used with these components, the faster electronic devices could perform. This would do things such as speed up the workings of your computer and Internet access.

The size of lasers in any one dimension (for example, thickness) has been thought to be limited to one-half of the wavelength involved.

For instance, for lasers used in optical communications the required wavelength is about 1,500 nanometers, so a 750-nanometer laser was thought to be the smallest a laser could be made for o
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