Multimedia Gallery
Cutting power could dramatically boost laser output
Researchers found that carefully shaping the area to which energy is delivered within a laser can dramatically improve the laser's performance. In the illustration here, pumping energy into a diamond shape produces a powerful, directional emission of light from the laser.
Reexamining longstanding beliefs about the physics of lasers, engineers have shown that carefully restricting the delivery of power to certain areas within a laser could boost its output by many orders of magnitude. The finding could allow far more sensitive and energy-efficient lasers, as well as potentially more control over the frequencies and spatial pattern of light emission.
Funding for this research came from the National Science Foundation through the Mid-Infrared Technologies for Health and the Environment Center based at Princeton (grant EEC 05-40832).
To learn more, see the Princeton news story Turning loss to gain: cutting power could boost laser output. (Date of Image: September 2014)
Credit: Omer Malik, Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
Images and other media in the National Science Foundation Multimedia Gallery are available for use in print and electronic material by NSF employees, members of the media, university staff, teachers and the general public. All media in the gallery are intended for personal, educational and nonprofit/non-commercial use only.
Images credited to the National Science Foundation, a federal agency, are in the public domain. The images were created by employees of the United States Government as part of their official duties or prepared by contractors as "works for hire" for NSF. You may freely use NSF-credited images and, at your discretion, credit NSF with a "Courtesy: National Science Foundation" notation.
Additional information about general usage can be found in Conditions.
Also Available:
Download the high-resolution JPG version of the image. (1.1 MB)
Use your mouse to right-click (Mac users may need to Ctrl-click) the link above and choose the option that will save the file or target to your computer.