The fastest lasers in the world flash out light pulses that last a quadrillionth of a second or less, which leads to some odd behavior.
But when a laser produces ultrashort light pulses, it often produces them in pairs. Like chemically bonded atoms in a molecule, these “coupled” pulses can oscillate, bouncing back and forth, or break apart into smaller bits.
But these coupled pulses’ unique properties had interested theoretical physicists for some time. They wondered if they could control the coupling. So, Herink and his colleagues built a ring—made of optical glass fibers like the ones that weave together the Internet—and began shooting light from a laser through the ring. The light pulses went round and round, where the researchers could watch them orbit.
With this in their toolbox, they could turn to the laser itself and see why it was misbehaving. They found that, by reducing the laser’s power for a short moment, they could break the bond and uncouple two pulses. Then, by reestablishing the power, they could bind the pulses together again, with a different separation in space and time.
Herink says he and his colleagues hope to build upon this work to create a system that lets them dictate sequences of short laser pulses. The methods that scientists currently use to do that can be relatively slow—taking up whole millionths of a second. By that time, the atom you want to measure may already be gone. Making the laser do the job instead is much more effective, Henrick says.
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