Lasers made from nanometre-scale wires could be valuable for small, fast, optical-communication and signal-processing devices, but researchers have been unable to tune the wavelength of the light emitted.
Limin Tong at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and his colleagues have made a laser from a cadmium selenide wire 200 nanometres in diameter and bent into two loops — resembling an elongated figure of eight. The loops act as mirrors to reflect the light back and forth, boosting the light's intensity. When the researchers decreased the size of one of the loops, the peak wavelength of the light shifted by 7 nanometres, suggesting that lasers created in this way could be made fully tunable.
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Laser from a tiny wire. Nature 472, 139 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/472139f
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/472139f
