A new research report from FLEET, an interdisciplinary research team based in Australia, details a major advancement in laser technology, showcasing a level of spectral purity that had not been achieved before.
Spectral purity refers to how closely the individual light frequencies (or colors) produced by a laser match each other. By using a special device called a scanning Fabry–Pérot interferometer, researchers were able to measure the laser’s spectral purity with great precision. They found that the laser’s linewidth, a measure of this purity, was incredibly narrow, at 56 MHz or 0.24 µeV, which is ten times smaller than previously recorded.
This achievement makes polariton lasers comparable to the current leading technology known as VCSELs, which are used in applications like facial recognition and augmented reality.
This could have significant potential applications in biometrics, particularly facial recognition. VCSELs (Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers) are commonly used in devices for facial recognition because they are efficient and reliable. But polariton lasers could offer an even better option because they operate at lower power. This is due to the unique way they generate light, through a state known as a bosonic condensate, which doesn’t require as much energy as conventional lasers.
This means that polariton lasers could make facial recognition devices more energy-efficient without sacrificing performance.
Another important finding from the research is that polariton lasers maintain their high spectral purity even when there is an overlap with less organized particles, which was previously thought to cause significant noise and degrade performance. The researchers discovered that as long as the polaritons are kept in a confined space, the noise from these particles has minimal impact. This makes polariton lasers even more practical for real-world applications, such as in various biometric systems that need to work reliably in different environments.
Another important finding is that the narrow linewidth of polariton lasers means they have a long coherence time. Coherence time is how long the laser can maintain its high-quality light, and in this case, it’s at least 5.7 nanoseconds. This might seem very short, but it’s enough time to perform thousands of operations in rapid succession, which is crucial for advanced applications like quantum computing.
Quantum computing involves processing information at incredibly high speeds using the principles of quantum mechanics, and the long coherence time of polariton lasers could make them an important tool in this field.
Source: Phys.org
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June 19, 2024 – by Cass Kennedy
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