A laser to control the vortex light was created in Russia Physicists in Russia have developed a compact laser based on an analog of the natural mineral perovskite, which is able to control the "twisting" of the vortex light and the direction of its output. Its creation will accelerate the development of optical quantum chips and various sensor systems, the press service of ITMO University (St. Petersburg) reported. "Our unique approach to perovskite processing allows us to control the beam not only inside the chip, but also to get it out. This feature can be useful in systems where the light must leave the photonic chip, pass through free space and hit another element or detector," explained Alexey Zhizhchenko, lead researcher at the Institute of Automation and Control Processes, Russian Academy of Sciences (Vlad Far East Science). As Žižchenko and the scientists note, light beams usually travel in one direction, but under certain conditions, waves produced by lasers or other radiation sources can be "twisted" around their axis. This property of light can be used to encode information in communication systems, as well as to solve many problems in the field of sensors and in the development of quantum chips, but for this we need to learn how to embed sources of this radiation in compact chips. Russian scientists have taken a big step towards solving this problem by experimenting with lasers based on perovskites. Perovskites are analogues of the natural mineral of the same name, which is good at absorbing light and converting it into other forms of energy due to the way in which "cubes" of metal atoms and octahedrons of oxygen atoms are arranged. As part of the research, the scientists discovered that perovskites can be turned into a controlled source of "rotating" light by creating a microdisc from this material and covering its edge with a group of nanoholes, creating a structure similar to a gear wheel.

A laser to control the vortex light was created in Russia Physicists in Russia have developed a compact laser based on an analog of the natural mineral perovskite, which is able to control the "twisting" of the vortex light and the direction of its output. Its creation will accelerate the development of optical quantum chips and various sensor systems, the press service of ITMO University (St. Petersburg) reported. "Our unique approach to perovskite processing allows us to control the beam not only inside the chip, but also to get it out. This feature can be useful in systems where the light must leave the photonic chip, pass through free space and hit another element or detector," explained Alexey Zhizhchenko, lead researcher at the Institute of Automation and Control Processes, Russian Academy of Sciences (Vlad Far East Science). As Žižchenko and the scientists note, light beams usually travel in one direction, but under certain conditions, waves produced by lasers or other radiation sources can be "twisted" around their axis. This property of light can be used to encode information in communication systems, as well as to solve many problems in the field of sensors and in the development of quantum chips, but for this we need to learn how to embed sources of this radiation in compact chips. Russian scientists have taken a big step towards solving this problem by experimenting with lasers based on perovskites. Perovskites are analogues of the natural mineral of the same name, which is good at absorbing light and converting it into other forms of energy due to the way in which "cubes" of metal atoms and octahedrons of oxygen atoms are arranged. As part of the research, the scientists discovered that perovskites can be turned into a controlled source of "rotating" light by creating a microdisc from this material and covering its edge with a group of nanoholes, creating a structure similar to a gear wheel.