{"id":238322,"date":"2026-06-04T02:31:31","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T07:31:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/ultrafast-laser-shrinks-to-chip-scale-potentially-lowering-costs-for-diagnostics-and-atomic-clocks"},"modified":"2026-06-04T02:31:31","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T07:31:31","slug":"ultrafast-laser-shrinks-to-chip-scale-potentially-lowering-costs-for-diagnostics-and-atomic-clocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/ultrafast-laser-shrinks-to-chip-scale-potentially-lowering-costs-for-diagnostics-and-atomic-clocks","title":{"rendered":"Ultrafast laser shrinks to chip scale, potentially lowering costs for diagnostics and atomic clocks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ultrafast-laser-shrinks-to-chip-scale-potentially-lowering-costs-for-diagnostics-and-atomic-clocks2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Ultrafast lasers emit pulses lasting only a few hundred femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second). These flashes of light power applications from precision micromachining to eye surgery to optical frequency combs, the Nobel Prize-winning technology behind today\u2019s most precise optical atomic clocks. Yet despite more than two decades of effort, ultrafast lasers have largely remained bulky, expensive systems confined to optical tables.<\/p>\n<p>Now a team led by Professor Tobias J. Kippenberg at EPFL has brought them onto a photonic chip. Publishing in <i>Nature<\/i>, the researchers report the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10517-4\" target=\"_blank\">first integrated ultrafast laser<\/a> to rival tabletop femtosecond lasers, delivering 1.05 nanojoules in pulses as short as 147 femtoseconds.<\/p>\n<p>Photonic chips guide and process light in microscopic channels called waveguides patterned on a wafer, similar to how electronic microchips route electricity. Already widely used in telecommunications, photonic chips have miniaturized complex functions that once required much larger systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ultrafast lasers emit pulses lasting only a few hundred femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second). These flashes of light power applications from precision micromachining to eye surgery to optical frequency combs, the Nobel Prize-winning technology behind today\u2019s most precise optical atomic clocks. Yet despite more than two decades of effort, ultrafast lasers have largely remained bulky, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1523],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-computing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}