Event Details

Optics News

Continuous-Wave Room-Temperature Diamond Maser

Speaker: Tuguldur Begzjav

The maser - the microwave progenitor of the optical laser - has been confined to relative obscurity owing to its reliance on cryogenic refrigeration and high-vacuum systems. Despite this, it has found application in deep-space communications and radio astronomy owing to its unparalleled performance as a low-noise amplifier and oscillator. The recent demonstration of a room-temperature solid-state maser that utilizes polarized electron populations within the triplet states of photo-excited pentacene molecules in a p-terphenyl host 1 - 3 paves the way for a new class of maser. However, p-terphenyl has poor thermal and mechanical properties, and the decay rates of the triplet sub-level of pentacene mean that only pulsed maser operation has been observed in this system. Alternative materials are therefore required to achieve continuous emission: inorganic materials that contain spin defects, such as diamond 4 - 6 and silicon carbide 7, have been proposed. Here we report a continuous-wave room-temperature maser oscillator using optically pumped nitrogen-vacancy defect centers in diamond. This demonstration highlights the potential of room-temperature solid-state masers for use in a new generation of microwave devices that could find application in medicine, security, sensing and quantum technologies

Reference

- Nature volume 555, pages 493-496 (22 March 2018), doi:10.1038/nature25970

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Main Talk

Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Scattering: Some New Developments With Infrared Lasers

Speaker: Zhenhuan Yi

In this talk Zhenhuan will briefly review Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Scattering/Spectroscopy (CARS) and introduce some new developments here at TAMU, including FAST CARS, MIRA CARS.