The new material lighting up laser efficiency
ChemSci Pick of the Week
A new material could vastly improve the efficiency of tunable lasers for a range of applications.
Lasers are useful for a range of applications, from surgery to telecommunications to data storage. In our everyday lives we often come across them in the form of coloured ‘pointers’ in school or in the office.
By their nature, however, they only exist at very specific wavelengths, which can limit their utility. The solution is to make use of materials that can convert light of one wavelength into a different wavelength: these are called nonlinear optical materials (NLOs). NLOs are what make it possible for us to have laser pointers in different colours, such as red, blue and green.
The most desirable NLOs should be cheap to make and have high efficiency – that is, they convert a high proportion of the original light into the new frequency, without absorbing or dispersing it. Dr Kang Min Ok from Chung-Ang University in the Republic of Korea, along with co-author Dr Guohong Zou from Sichaun University, Chengdu, have developed a new type of crystal that functions as an NLO, and is 23 times more efficient than the current industry benchmark.
Not only is it highly efficient but it’s also cheap and easy to make, using evaporation from a solution at low temperature. It is also very robust – it isn’t easily damaged by lasers, and it maintains its structure at temperatures of up to 300 oC.
“We believe that the growth of large NLO crystals with extremely strong efficiency and high thermal stability through a simple synthetic method is the most important step toward the development of high quality NLO materials for important applications, such as optical communication and various information technology,” says Dr Kang Min Ok. “Fundamental understanding of the structure-property relationship for new NLO materials would be very important part to develop further advanced optical materials more systematically, for future applications such as high quality fibre optics, telecommunications, medical diagnosis, and military devices.”
This article is free to read in our open access, flagship journal Chemical Science: G. Zou et al., Chem. Sci., 2018, Advance Article. DOI: 10.1039/C8SC03672A. You can access all of our ChemSci Picks in this article collection.
ChemSci Pick of the Week
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