A principle of ultrafast laser
Scientists from Germany managed to solve one of the elusive Physics – getting so short pulse to the one contained only a single oscillation of the light wave. The work of a group of scientists abandoned the laser crystal, usually used for the creation of ultrashort optical pulses, in favor of the fiber and the wavelength of light, taken in telecommunications.
In accordance with the laws of physics outbreaks can be almost as short as the pulse of light. “The ultrashort pulses can be used as a flash to fix dynamic events such as the interaction of the individual protons and electrons,” – says Leytenstorfer Alfred (Alfred Leitenstorfer) from the University of Konstanz (University of Konstanz), Germany. Moreover, a set of several single pulses more energy than a single pulse containing even greater number of peaks and troughs.
“Generation of single pulse with virtually all fiber system will certainly become a milestone in optical technologies”, – assures Fährmann Martin (Martin Fermann) from Imra America, companies producing lasers. He expects that the system with a single pulse will be the new standard in areas with advanced machinery display, perception and signal processing.
The uncertainty principle, formulated by Werner Heisenberg, sets the limit of the minimum possible sequence of a light pulse for a given wavelength depending on the time or the number of periods. Therefore, in the infrared due to the uncertainty principle necessary to reduce the momentum to a few femtoseconds.
Scientists from Constanta started with a single-fiber laser pulses, placed between two layers of optical fibers containing rare-earth erbium, one of which lengthens the wavelength by 40%, while the other layer is reduced by the same amount. These two layers and then converge, resulting in interfering and neutralize most of the waves, leaving only a single wave with a period of 4.3 fs. Pulses shorter than 3.9 fs were obtained from the use of wavelengths of about 2 times shorter. However, the relationship between wavelength and frequency is not rigid.
“The key to success lies in using one source to create two light pulses, which are then combined to obtain a shorter pulse” – explains Leytenstorfer. “And it is through the entire optical system, we were able to combine these parts.” After that, the main problem consisted in the measurement of the momentum. Sequences of short pulses were compared with each other to make sure that each of them was a length of only one pulse.
In the near future, this achievement will enable faster data transfer via fiber optic cables by reducing the minimum amount of light needed to encode a single element in a binary system.
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