Boffins build evanescent laser

An evanescent laser does not put bubbles into tonic water but is part of the technology needed to integrate optical and electronic functions on a single chip and enables new types of integrated circuits.

If it all works then it will be possible to build cheaper, more energy efficient, and compact chips, the boffins think.

According to Optics Express, here, which we get for the spot the ball competition, mode-locked evanescent lasers can deliver stable short pulses of laser light for high-speed data transmission, multiple wavelength generation and remote sensing (LIDAR).

The boffins said that by causing silicon to emit light and exhibit other potentially useful optical properties, integration of photonic devices on silicon will be feasible.

In the past it was considered impossible to bring a laser near any silicon and some extremely clever people had written the whole idea off.

Last year a research team at UCSB and Intel, managed to create laser light from electrical current on silicon by placing a layer of InP above the silicon and the idea was back in play. The new study shows the boffins using the idea to demonstrate electrically-pumped lasers emitting 40 billion pulses of light per second.

These short pulses are composed of evenly spaced colours of laser light. These can be divided and used to transmit different high-speed information.

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