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| Research at home and abroad, including the KAIST Ultra-Generation Collaboration Lab team that implemented ultra-small, low-power, and low-noise Brillouin lasers, was published on November 23 in Nature Communications./ⓒNature Communications, KAIST Professor Han-Seok Lee’s team |
[ATN뉴스=이기종 기자] The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) is a joint research team of Professors Han-Seok Lee and Professor Lee Yong-hee of the Department of Physics (the first-generation cooperative laboratory) to realize the ultra-small, low-power, low-noise Brillouin laser through joint research with the research team of Professor Moohan Choi and Professor Deokyong Choi of National University of Australia It was announced on the 24th that it was successful.
The joint research team maximized the performance by developing a Brillouin laser based on chalcogen compound glass, which causes Brillouin scattering hundreds of times better than conventional materials.
Brillouin laser generates and amplifies laser light based on Brillouin scattering, and the easier the medium of the laser causes Brillouin scattering, the less energy it can operate.
For this reason, the output laser light has a lower frequency fluctuation and very low noise than the input pump light.
In addition, Brillouin scattering is a phenomenon in which light interacts with a medium to generate acoustic phonon and is scattered. It can be used in laser construction because it is possible to duplicate light of the same characteristics.
Chalcogen compound glass has a fundamental weakness in that it is difficult to form by etching on a chip due to its chemical instability, but the research team solved this problem by developing a new fabrication technique in which an optical element is spontaneously formed during the deposition process.
The manufacturing technique developed by the research team can be compared to obtaining the desired shape of snow by controlling only the shape of the roof without directly touching the snow, since the shape of the snow accumulated on the roof in winter is determined by the shape of the roof.
This is the first demonstration of a phenomenon in which an optical element with excellent performance is spontaneously formed by depositing a chalcogen compound glass on it when the floor structure is properly formed using silicon oxide, which is easy to process with the current semiconductor process technology.
In particular, using this self-developed manufacturing technique, a high-performance Brillouin laser based on a chalcogen compound glass was implemented on a semiconductor chip in the form of a microscopic optical device, and it was shown that the laser can be driven with pump energy that is more than 100 times lower than the previous record.
With these characteristics, the joint research team’s development of the Brillouin laser light source is expected to be widely used in the development of next-generation optical sensors, such as dramatically improving the sensitivity of the rotational inertia sensor as well as the distance required for autonomous driving.
Corresponding author Lee Han-seok, who led the study, said, “The chalcogen compound glass can be applied to the mid-infrared band where absorption lines of various molecules exist, so it will be able to expand its application to the field of environmental monitoring and healthcare based on molecular spectroscopy.” .
The research in which a doctoral student Kim Dae-gon of the Department of Physics at KAIST and a postdoctoral researcher Han Sang-yoon (currently a professor at the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology) participated as co-first authors was published on November 23 in the international academic journal Nature Communications.
This research was selected for the 2018 Samsung Future Technology Promotion Project and was conducted with continuous support.
Reporter Kijong Lee at ATN News [email protected]
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