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The light emerging from next gen lasers

Updated: Sep 26, 2022

PCSELs are emerging as a promising platform for next-generation optical applications


Lasers provide highly concentrated beams of light that can be used for a variety of purposes, including transmitting data, cutting and welding materials, measuring distances, scanning barcodes, and in various healthcare and defence applications.


While lasers have been around for some time, they are becoming more advanced and are being used on a wider scale due to the declining cost of production; advanced lasers are therefore an emerging technology. In the coming years, it is expected that lasers will become an increasingly common sight in in a wider array of domestic, commercial and industrial settings.


All-semiconductor photonic crystal surface emitting lasers (PCSELs) are a new type of semiconductor laser using photonic crystals to confine light in a very small volume, allowing precise control over the wavelength, phase, and polarization of the laser output. A photonic crystal is a periodic array of dielectric materials {electrical insulators that can be polarised – restricting light waves to propagate in one direction – by an applied electric field} with a periodicity {the time it takes something to occur, whereas frequency is the number of occurrences} that is of the order of the wavelength of light.


Compared to currently lasers, PCSELs main advantages include an improved price-performance ratio, and much improved highly concentrated beam quality, therefore they are well suited to develop next generation applications including better medical imaging, higher speed & higher bandwidth data transmission, pico-projection (increasingly small projectors), LIDAR (a method for determining ranges at variable distances by targeting an object or a surface with a laser and measuring the time for the reflected light to return to the receiver, used in autonomous vehicles) and a range of other sensing applications.


PCSELs are far easier to manufacture than traditional lasers as they are fabricated using standard semiconductor processing techniques, which underpins the increased system efficiency, along with the improvements in single mode power allowing a greater amount of light to be delivered to targets. PCSELs are adept at varying the wavelengths of the light generated, and to improve beam steering, hence the advantages of the established production base feed into a series of new attributes inevitably giving rise to novel next generation laser applications, including some that will coalesce with other emerging technologies.


In healthcare for example. lasers have been successfully used in medicine for surgery, with applications ranging from the cauterization of blood vessels to drilling holes through organs including the heart. Diagnostic devices incorporating lasers are being developed in biomedical imaging such as in optical tomography which detects abnormalities within the body, as an alternate to using potentially harmful ionizing radiation. The process works efficiently because human tissue is translucent to the types of light directed by lasers. We can therefore look towards more effective use of lasers in healthcare once PCSELs hit the market.


You should think about how these new lasers could be used in your organisation.


Mike E. Halsall. Sept 2022

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