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Lasers

All mirrors are not created equal

Nature Photonics volume 1, pages 87–88 (2007)Cite this article

Lasers are a triumph of modern optics, and mirrors play a crucial role in the coherent light produced. A hi-tech reflector could make lasers a lot smaller and lead to their inclusion in an even wider range of optical devices.

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Figure 1: Mirrors go head to head: the HCG (left) versus the DBR (right).
Figure 2: How do different mirrors perform? By calculating the reflectivity as a function of normalized wavelength, we can compare the reflecting capabilities of a simple cleaved crystal facet (black dashed line), a traditional DBR (red dashed line) and the HCG from the Berkeley group (blue line).
Figure 3

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alan E. Willner is in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering and the Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089-2565, USA. willner@usc.edu,

    Alan E. Willner

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Willner, A. All mirrors are not created equal. Nature Photon 1, 87–88 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2006.88

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