Ultrafast laser shrinks to chip scale, potentially lowering costs for diagnostics and atomic clocks

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's 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.

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