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2h ago

EPFL Shrinks Tabletop Femtosecond Laser Onto a Photonic Chip

The team’s Nature paper shows a lab prototype that could cut the size and cost of precision lasers by using a different oscillator design and a wafer-scale fabrication platform.

Placed on a 1 CHF coin for scale, EPFL's photonic chip shows how a laser architecture once confined to table-top systems can be shrunk to the millimeter scale.
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Overview

  • Researchers at EPFL reported in Nature on June 3 that they built the first integrated ultrafast femtosecond laser on a photonic chip that produced 1.05 nanojoules pulses as short as 147 femtoseconds.
  • The device uses a Mamyshev oscillator, which forces weak light out with paired optical filters and lets intense pulses broaden in a nonlinear waveguide so part of the pulse passes both filters and keeps circulating.
  • The laser folds a 42-centimeter cavity into a match-head-sized area and was fabricated on an erbium-doped silicon nitride platform that the team says is compatible with wafer-scale production and more than 1,000 cavities per run.
  • The result is a clear laboratory milestone but not a product yet because engineers still must solve system-level work including thermal control, long-term reliability, packaging, and integration with power and control electronics.
  • If those engineering and commercial steps succeed the chips could bring kilowatt-level peak powers to smaller tools, enabling cheaper handheld sensors, field medical diagnostics, and more compact optical atomic clocks for navigation and communications.