Electrons in the new laser cascade down 75 steps, instead of 20 or 30 as in earlier QC lasers. The QC laser was invented five years ago by Federico Capasso and Jerome Faist at Bell Labs, and commercial applications are now being explored in areas like environmental sensing, pollution monitoring, combustion diagnostics, collision avoidance, radar, and medicine. Gmachl, Bell Labs researcher Alessandro Tredicucci, and Edward Whittaker of Stevens Institute of Technology, in New Jersey, will each present an additional APS technical paper related to QC-laser technology. A QC laser's wavelength is determined by several factors. In use, adjusting the temperature or the electrical current applied to the laser changes its wavelength.
Semiconductor lasers are now the most widely used and versatile class of lasers.
Lucent Technologies, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., designs, builds and delivers a wide range of public and private networks, communications systems and software, consumer and business telephone systems and microelectronics components.