NIST Downsizes Lasers

The world is downsizing in search for the many benefits, including sustainability, specificity, and speed. Lasers used as light sources are no exception, as shown by an article by Wenqi Zhu and colleagues at the Center for Nanaoscale Science and Technology at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD. They have developed a general, potentially printable technology to produce nanoscale lasers with a bandwidth of 0.24 nm that can be used for detection of small samples.

The report is entitled, “Surface plasmon polariton laser based upon a metallic trench Fabry-Perot resonator” (Science Advances, Oct 6, 2017, 3[10], e1700909; doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1700909.) These are not common design terms for conventional analytical lasers. The device is a very flat, nanometer-scale channel in silver (called a Fabry-Perot cavity) with vertical silver walls. Its bottom is coated with a subwavelength-thick layer of a polymeric optically pumped gain medium (polymethyl methacrylate doped with 3 mM 4-(dicyanomethylene)-2-methyl-6-(4-dimethlaminostyral)-4H-Pyran). This provides room-temperature lasing at 637 nm when pumped with white light. The lased light exits the device via a nano-slit. Details of the construction are provided in the paper.

In practice, incoherent white light illuminates the channel for optical pumping. The lased light exits through the slit and passes to an inverted microscope. The authors explain that the template-stripping fabrication technology is compatible with printing arrays of resonators for multiplexed applications.

Robert L. Stevenson, Ph.D., is Editor Emeritus, American Laboratory/Labcompare; email: [email protected].

Related Products

Comments