The next generation of femtosecond workhorses

This article chronicles the evolution of femtosecond lasers from delicate systems to Menhir Photonics’ durable monolithic oscillators, which achieve timing jitter well below 1 fs and fit inside shoebox-sized, mail-deliverable packages. These stable, compact lasers are ideal for precision timing distribution, phased-array telescopes, radar, particle accelerators, and photonic analog-to-digital conversion—the latter leveraging low-jitter clocking to enable extremely high-rate sampling and coherent RF generation over fiber links. The piece emphasizes their ruggedness and versatility, pointing toward expanded deployment in space and high-precision industrial applications.