Bright Ideas — 3D Metal Printing Advancements, Improvements On Optical Ranging Technology, Controlling Radiation Direction, And More

By John Oncea, Editor

Bright Ideas presents the most captivating news and innovations in optics and photonics. This week, we look at SEEQC’s energy-efficient digital chips, ultra-efficient white light lasers, observing atoms in outer space to improve the measurement of climate factors, and more.

University of Toronto (go Varsity Blues!) researchers, led by Professor Yu Zou in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, are working to advance the field of metal additive manufacturing at the university’s first metal 3D printing laboratory, the University announced. Using CAD to construct materials layer by layer, the technology can improve manufacturing across aerospace, biomedical, energy, and automotive industries. “We are working to uncover the fundamental physics behind the additive manufacturing process, as well as improving its robustness and creating novel structural and functional materials through its applications,” said Zou. Rather than make parts from bulk materials, the metal 3D printing process enables microstructure and materials constitutions to be locally tailored, meaning they can exhibit distinct properties. “For example, medical implants require human bone-like materials that are dense and hard on the outside, but porous on the inside,” says Xiao Shang, a Ph.D. candidate in Zou’s lab. “With traditional manufacturing, that’s hard to accomplish – but metal printing gives you a lot more control and customized products.”

SEEQC became the first company to produce all-digital superconducting chips for control, readout, and multiplexing of a quantum computer. The family of high-speed, energy-efficient Single Flux Quantum (SFQ) digital chips can run all core qubit controller functions of a quantum computer at the same cryogenic temperature as the qubits. The chips are also fully integrated with qubits — a critical milestone in building scalable error-corrected quantum computers and data centers. “Instead of trying to scale quantum computing systems based on existing prototype designs, we decided to start from scratch,” said Dr. Oleg Mukhanov, SEEQC’s CTO and cofounder, “developing a wholly new architecture based on Single Flux Quantum chips that will enable us to build the class of quantum computer necessary for fault-tolerant quantum computers. Only by incorporating all functionality within high-performance chips will we be able to scale energy efficient quantum systems to data center requirements.”

Optics.org reports that IBM and EPFL researchers have developed a based lithium niobate laser that could have a significant impact on optical ranging technology. Lithium niobate can handle a lot of optical power and has a high Pockels coefficient, which means that it can change its optical properties when an electric field is applied to it. Researchers combined it with silicon nitride to produce a new type of hybrid integrated tunable laser. To do this, the team manufactured integrated circuits for light (photonic integrated circuits) based on silicon nitride at EPFL and then bonded them with lithium niobate wafers at IBM. “What is remarkable about the result is that the laser simultaneously provides low phase noise and fast petahertz-per-second tuning, something that has never before been achieved with such a chip-scale integrated laser,” said Professor Tobias J. Kippenberg, who led the EPFL side of the project.

University of Twente researchers have developed an ultra-efficient white light laser on a chip, the University announced. This represents a major step forward in the field of integrated photonics and enables applications in portable medical imaging devices, chemical sensing, and LiDAR. “With this method, we reduced the amount of pulse energy needed around a thousandfold compared to traditional methods”, says first-author Haider Zia, “This is an exciting development in the field of integrated photonics. Our method offers a more efficient way to generate supercontinuum light on a chip, which has many potential applications in medical imaging and LiDAR.”

A multi-university team of researchers, under the guidance of the NASA Quantum Pathways Institute, is helping build technology and tools to improve the measurement of important climate factors by observing atoms in outer space, reports The Current. “We are peering into a universe that we’ve never peered into before,” said UC Santa Barbara (go Gauchos!) professor of electrical and computer engineering Daniel Blumenthal, a member of the research team led by colleagues at the University of Texas (go Longhorns!). The researchers will focus on quantum sensing, which involves observing how atoms react to small changes in their environment, using it to infer the time variations in the gravity field of the Earth. This will enable scientists to improve accuracy in measurements of several important climate processes, such as sea level rise, rate of ice melt, changes in land water resources, and ocean heat storage changes.

A City University of Hong Kong (go Tigers!) research team announced it has invented a groundbreaking tunable terahertz (THz) meta-device that can control the radiation direction and coverage area of THz beams, according to Mirage. By rotating its metasurface, the device can promptly direct the 6G signal only to a designated recipient, minimizing power leakage and enhancing privacy. It is expected to provide a highly adjustable, directional, and secure means for future 6G communications systems. “The advent of a tunable THz meta-device presents exciting prospects for 6G communications systems,” said Professor Tsai Din-Ping, Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and expert in the field of metasurfaces and photonics. “Our meta-device allows for signal delivery to specific users or detectors and has the flexibility to adjust the propagating direction, as needed.”

A team of physicists led by Prof. Dr. Ulf Peschel is exploring methods to accurately control vast numbers of optical pulses to limit the influence of interactions, AZoOptics reports. The team, made up of physicists from Friedrich Schiller University Jena and Orlando’s College of Optics and Photonics, observed an ensemble of optical pulses as they moved across an optical fiber to this end and discovered that it follows certain principles, namely those of thermodynamics. Peschel found the results astonishing, saying, “We have found that the light pulses organize themselves after about a hundred kilometers and then behave more like molecules of a conventional gas, such as air, for example.”