New method to manipulate light a million times more efficiently

Using a special hollow-core photonic crystal fibre, a team at the University of Bath, UK, has opened the door to what could prove to be a new sub-branch of photonics, the science of light guidance and trapping.

The team, led by Dr Fetah Benabid, reports on the discovery, which relates to the emerging attotechnology, the ability to send out pulses of light that last only an attosecond, a billion billionth of a second.

It is 1000 times shorter than a femtosecond. Short pulse lasers are a very interesting and emerging tool for science and technology They can destroy viruses and bacteria. They can vaporize matter without heat and be used for precise micromachining

These pulses are so brief that they allow researchers to more accurately measure the movement of sub-atomic particles such as the electron, the tiny negatively-charged entity which moves outside the nucleus of an atom. Attosecond technology may throw light, literally, upon the strange quantum world where such particles have no definite position,only probable locations.

To make attosecond pulses, researchers create a broad spectrum of light from visible wavelengths to x-rays through an inert gas. This normally requires a gigawatt of power, which puts the technique beyond any commercial or industrial use.

Dr Benabid’s team used a photonic crystal fibre (pcf), the width of a human hair, which traps light and the gas together in an efficient way. Until now the spectrum produced by photonic crystal fibre has been too narrow for use in attosecond technology, but the team have now produced a broad spectrum, using what is called a Kagomé lattice, using about a millionth of the power used by non-pcf methods.

Tthe team makes use of the fact that light can exist in different ‘modes’ without strongly interacting. This creates a situation whereby light can be trapped inside the fibre core without the need of photonic bandgap. Physicists call these modes bound states within a continuum.