Sally Johnson

1 week ago | laserfocusworld.com | Sally Johnson

Beyond laser technology advances, the path to putting commercial laser-driven fusion energy on the grid by the 2040s or 2050s requires high-precision optics that can meet stringent optical, mechanical, and thermal specifications to withstand extreme conditions. Laser-driven fusion technology is currently being fast-tracked to put carbon-free energy on the power grids—and hopefully help save the planet.

3 weeks ago | laserfocusworld.com | Sally Johnson

A journey of scientific planning, design, engineering, and precision that began back in the 1990s has led to this moment: the NSF-DOE Vera C.

4 weeks ago | laserfocusworld.com | Sally Johnson

A quantum “tornado” is a simplified term for an orbital vortex line, and work led by Maximilian Ünzelmann, a Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter (ct.qmat) postdoctoral researcher at the Universities of Würzburg and Dresden in Germany, experimentally demonstrated electrons form these vortices within the momentum space of quantum semimetal tantalum arsenide (TaAs). Momentum space describes electron motion in terms of energy and direction—not a precise physical position.

1 month ago | laserfocusworld.com | Sally Johnson

Inspired by the rapid evolution and broad applications of vortex beams, an international team of researchers from China, Japan, and Australia set out to address a few challenges of traditional population inversion lasers—namely limitations in wavelength scalability and power scaling. Drawing upon their earlier work with diamond-based lasers, the researchers realized diamond’s exceptional thermo-optical properties could offer a breakthrough solution.

1 month ago | laserfocusworld.com | Sally Johnson

New work on breathing soliton lasers by a team of scientists, including Professor Junsong Peng at the East China Normal University in Shanghai, recently led to the discovery of a novel route to chaos. Solitons are localized wave packets that propagate without changes in dispersive/diffraction mediums, thanks to balance between dispersion/diffraction and nonlinearity.