QUANTUM-CASCADE LASERS: Single laser emits beams at two angles

摘要

A new member of the quantum-cascade laser (QCL) family has some impressive characteristics--like lasing at two or more wavelengths, or in multiple directions. The result is another in a growing line of QCL output-modification techniques developed by an international team of researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Zurich, Switzerland), Hamamatsu (Hamamatsu City, Japan), and the group headed by QCL co-inventor Federico Capasso at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts). The trick--as with the team's prior creations--lies in plasmonics, the manipulation of the quantized, high-frequency free-electron oscillations known as plasmons.