A novel type of nanolasers, which combines the advantages of photonic crystal lasers and microdisk lasers, has been demonstrated based on InAlGaAs/InGaAs quantum wells using pulsed optical pumping at room temperature. It incorporates the properties of small footprint, small mode volume, and submilliwatt threshold, and favors vertical emission. We believe that this type of laser acts as a promis...

The development of biochips is a major thrust of the rapidly growing biotechnology industry. Research on biomedical or biochemical analysis miniaturization and integration has made explosive progress by using biochips recently. For example, capillary electrophoresis (CE), sample preconcentration, genomic DNA extraction, and DNA hybridization have been successfully miniaturized and operated in a...

A biologically-inspired micropumping model in a three-dimensional tube subjected to localized wall constrictions is given in this article. The present study extends our previous pumping model where a 3D channel with a square cross-section is considered. The proposed pumping approach herein applies to tubular geometries and is given to mimic an insect respiration mode, where the tracheal tube rh...

Recent numerical and theoretical studies have demonstrated that the modes at threshold of a random laser are in direct correspondance with the resonances of the same system without gain, a feature which is well known in a conventional laser but which was not known until recently for a random laser. This paper presents numerical results, which extend such studies to the multimode regime that tak...

Recently, the world's first room-temperature maser was demonstrated. The maser consisted of a sapphire ring housing a crystal of pentacene-doped p-terphenyl, pumped by a pulsed rhodamine-dye laser. Stimulated emission of microwaves was aided by the high quality factor and small magnetic mode volume of the maser cavity yet the peak optical pumping power was 1.4 kW. Here we report dramatic miniat...

The steady-state and transient dynamics of phase locking in a two-element Nd:YAG laser array have been studied. By creating two evanescent-coupled lasers in a Nd:YAG étalon using diode end pumping, the coupling strength between the laser elements in the array can be continuously varied by adjusting the positions of the pumping beams. This allows the observation of the phase-locking process over...

We study a single-wall carbon nanotube (SWNT) Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) composite as a saturable absorber (SA) for pulse generation in Yb-doped fiber lasers. The saturable absorption and optical limiting (OL) characteristics of the SWNT device are investigated. By combing these two nonlinear effects, we find out for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, that mode-locking can be obtained i...

We have characterized the modes within two-dimensional photonic crystal nanocavities with self-organized indium arsenide quantum dots as an active material. Highly localized donor mode resonances with 3 to 5 nm linewidth were observed when spatially selective optical pumping the cavities. These modes could be lithographically tuned from 1100 to 1300 nm. Other, more extended modes, were also cha...

We report a continuous-wave (cw) 532-nm-pumped singly resonant optical parametric oscillator (SRO) based on periodically poled lithium niobate. The pump source is a commercial 5-W cw diode-pumped, multilongitudinal-mode, intracavity-doubled Nd:YVO(4) laser. Using a four-mirror ring SRO cavity and single-pass pumping, we achieved subwatt internal oscillation threshold, 56% quantum efficiency, an...

We report operation of a laser-diode side-pumped Nd: YAG laser with a novel pumping geometry that ensures efficient conversion of pump energy into the TEM(00) mode. Of the 1064-nm output, 11.8 mJ of energy was obtained in a 200-micros pulse with 64 mJ of pump energy at 808 nm. The overall conversion and slope efficiencies were 18% and 23%, respectively.