![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/low-res-11.jpeg\" "\\"Scientists")
EPFL\u2019s chip-based ultrafast laser operating in the laboratory test setup.\u00a0Credit: Zheru Qiu\/EPFL<\/p>\nResearchers at EPFL \u2013 Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne have integrated an ultrafast femtosecond laser onto a photonic chip.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a major milestone, the tiny laser went toe-to-toe with tabletop models, packing 1.05 nanojoules of energy into fleeting 147-femtosecond bursts.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor more than twenty years, a high-pulse-energy femtosecond laser on chip was widely regarded as a holy grail of integrated photonics,\u201d said Professor Tobias J. Kippenberg at EPFL.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOur result shows that it is not only possible, but that it can be achieved with a surprisingly elegant architecture that the integrated-photonics community had overlooked,\u201d added Kippenberg.\u00a0<\/p>\n
EPFL\u2019s chip-based ultrafast laser operating in the laboratory test setup.\u00a0Credit: Zheru Qiu\/EPFL<\/p>\n
Photonic chip milestone<\/p>\n
In this work, an ultrafast laser<\/a> was miniaturized using photonic chips to route light through microscopic waveguides rather than bulky laboratory equipment. These emit incredibly precise light pulses lasting only a few hundred femtoseconds<\/a> or quadrillionths of a second.<\/p>\n The high-speed lasers are vital for advanced applications like eye surgery, micromachining, and atomic clocks.<\/p>\n The EPFL team has achieved what many in the field considered impossible. They have built the first integrated chip-scale ultrafast laser that matches the raw performance of its giant, tabletop ancestors.<\/p>\n To pull this off, the EPFL team had to rethink how lasers handle light.<\/p>\n Instead of routing electricity through copper wires, photonic chips<\/a> guide light through microscopic channels called waveguides etched into a wafer. But when you squeeze immense laser power into channels thousands of times thinner than a human hair, the light violently interacts with itself. <\/p>\n In standard laser designs, this structural stress causes the hyper-fast pulses to destabilize and rip themselves apart.<\/p>\n The solution lay in a forgotten, decades-old fiber-laser concept: the Mamyshev oscillator<\/a>.<\/p>\n Use in GPS and medicine<\/p>\n Operating like a highly selective photon security checkpoint, this design traps light inside a laser cavity between two optical<\/a> filters tuned to entirely different color spectra.\u00a0<\/p>\n While weak, chaotic light fails the test and dies out because it cannot pass through both barriers, high-powered pulses behave differently. Inside the tiny channel, intense pulses naturally spread out into a wide range of colors<\/a>. This allows the light to clear both filters, loop back, and gain power.<\/p>\n