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What would you do if you owned the world's most powerful laser? The US government is hoping to use it to achieve the ignition of thermonuclear fusion in the lab for the first time. Nature Photonics spoke to Edward Moses of the National Ignition Facility to find out more.
Defect engineering is crucial for realizing all-optical integrated circuits from self-assembled photonic crystals. A two-photon polymerization strategy paves the way towards incorporation of arbitrary defects in silicon inverse opal photonic crystals.
Fibre-laser technology is enabling the creation of new types of compact light sources with unique ultrabroad or ultranarrow spectral characteristics. These lasers are now finding applications in diverse fields ranging from biotechnology to test and measurement apparatus.
Flexibility, speed of processing and maintenance-free operation are now rapidly making fibre lasers the technology of choice for marking plastics and metals.
Although large research facilities are sometimes criticized for the colossal amounts of funding they consume, the lessons that are learnt from the 'extreme' science that they perform benefit labs of all sizes.
The regeneration of weak and distorted optical signals is vital in long-haul optical communication systems. Now scientists at Cornell University have developed an all-optical scheme that performs the task and is small enough to fit on a chip.