ANTI-LASER TECHNOLOGY

ABSTRACT
More than 50 years after the invention of the laser, scientists at Yale University have built the world's first anti-laser, in which incoming beams of light interfere with one another in such a way as to perfectly cancel each other out. The discovery could pave the way for a number of novel technologies with applications in everything from optical computing to radiology. Conventional lasers, which were first invented in 1960, use a so-called "gain medium," usually a semiconductor like gallium arsenide, to produce a focused beam of coherent light -- light waves with the same frequency and amplitude that are in step with one another.

A Coherent perfect absorber (CPA), or anti-laser, is a device which absorbs coherent light and converts it to some form of internal energy such as heat or electrical energy. It is the time reversed counterpart of a laser. The concept was first published in the July 26, 2010, issue of Physical Review Letters, by a team at Yale University led by theorist A. Douglas Stone. In the September 9, 2010, issue of Physical Review A, Stefano Longhi of Politecnico di Milano showed how to combine a laser and an anti-laser in a single device. In February 2011 the team at Yale built the first working anti-laser. It is a two-channel CPA device which absorbs the output of two lasers, but only when the beams have the correct phases and amplitudes. The initial device was able to absorb 99.4 percent of all incoming light, but the team behind the invention believe it will be possible to increase this number to 99.999 percent.

In this time-reversed counterpart to laser emission, incident coherent optical fields are perfectly absorbed within a resonator that contains a loss medium instead of a gain medium. The incident fields and frequency must coincide with those of the corresponding laser with gain. We demonstrated this effect for two counter propagating incident fields in a silicon cavity, showing that absorption can be enhanced by two orders of magnitude, the maximum predicted by theory for the experimental setup. In addition, it shows that absorption can be reduced substantially by varying the relative phase of the incident fields. The device, termed a coherent perfect absorber, functions as an absorptive interferometer, with potential practical applications in integrated optics.