Lasers & Sources

Credit: Zheru Qiu/EPFL
Zheru Qiu and colleague Xuan Yang in the lab with the team’s on-chip ultrafast laser.
Yes—finally! Generation of intense ultrafast pulses directly on chip brings a new capability to photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and enables integration of more functionalities...
June 12, 2026
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Following the Photons: A Photonics Podcast
June 2, 2026
Credit: Caroline Perron
Pierre Luc Thériault, a Ph.D. student in engineering physics, aligns the team’s experimental setup.
June 2, 2026
Credit: Isaac Nape
Light Mkhumbuza, a graduate student at Wits University’s School of Physics, who ran the team’s experiments.
June 1, 2026
Credit: Vahala Lab/Caltech
Researchers at Caltech have designed an approach for guiding light on silicon wafers with low signal loss comparable to that of optical fiber at visible wavelengths, which paves the way for a new generation of PICs.
May 29, 2026
Credit: Michael Livingston
Kirill Lezhnin with his white board.
May 14, 2026
Credit: Urban Senica
3D illustration of the team’s device, in which an external microwave signal induces gain modulation along the entire semiconductor laser to generate widely tunable modelocked pulses/frequency combs.
May 4, 2026
FIGURE 1. Comparison of laser frequency deviation: The unlocked laser (gray) exhibits significant environmental drift, while the analog lock (blue) suppresses most of this noise but is limited by hardware-induced drift and component tolerances. The digital implementation (green) leverages high-speed DSP to achieve a near-zero error signal and provide the superior stability required.
April 29, 2026
Credit: R. Jacobson/NIST
Shot of the team’s chip glowing blue.
April 27, 2026

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