Researchers Demonstrate 'Random, Transistor' Laser That Can Be Manipulated at Nanoscale

In the last half-century, laser technology has grown to a multi-billion-dollar global industry and has been used in all optical devices and barcode scanners.

Not to mention those laser pointers that entertain and confound your cat.

Now, Researchers at Case Western Reserve University, in collaboration with partners around the world, have been able to control the direction of a laser beam output by applying external voltage.

It is a historic first among scientists who have been experimenting with what they call "random lasers" over the last 15 years or so.

"There is still a lot of work to do, but this is a clear first proof of a random laser, where the laser emission can be routed and applied by an external voltage," said Giuseppe Strangi, professor and Ohio Research Scholar in Surfaces. of Advanced Materials at Case Western Reserve University.

Strangi, who led the research, and his collaborators recently published a paper published in the journal Nature Communications. The project, funded by the National Academy of Sciences of Finland, was aimed at overcoming certain physical limitations that second generation of lasers.

Laser successes, laser limitations

The history of laser technology has been fast-paced as the only source of life in the world, including telecommunications, biomedicine and measurement technology.

But laser technology has been hampered by significant shortcomings: Not only do they need to be able to use a laser device, but to function, they require a precise alignment of components, making them expensive to produce.

Those limitations could be eliminated: Strangi and research partners in Italy, Finland and the United Kingdom have recently demonstrated a new approach to both random laser light and nano-scale.

Eventually, this procedure is more likely to be followed by the introduction of a fiber optic communication line with the flip of a dialect, Strangi said.

'Random' lasers made better

So how do lasers actually work?

Conventional lasers consist of an optical cavity, or opening, in a given device. Inside that cavity is a photoluminescent material which emits and amplifies light and a pair of mirrors. The mirrors force the photons, or light particles, to bounce back and forth at a specific frequency to produce the laser beam we see emitting from the laser.

"But what if we wanted to miniaturize it and get rid of the mirrors and make a laser cavity and go down to the nanoscale?" he asked. "That was a problem in the real world and we could not go back to the turn of this century with random lasers."

So random lasers, which have been researched in earnest for the last 15 years, differ from the original technology first in 1960 largely in that they do not rely on that mirrored cavity.