A long-elusive goal of physics has been reached – producing a pulse of light so short that it contains just a single oscillation of a light wave.
The flashes are almost as short as a light pulse can be, according to the laws of physics. The new super-short pulses could used as flashguns to sense very small, very fast events such as a single photon interacting with a single electron, says Alfred Leitenstorfer of the University of Konstanz in Germany. A single-cycle pulse packs in energy more densely than a pulse containing more wave peaks and troughs.
They could also show the way to boosting data transmission through fibre-optic cables, by shrinking the minimum amount of light needed to encode a single digital 1 or 0.
Leitenstorfer's group shunned the crystalline lasers typically used by physicists looking to make super-short light pulses and used optical-fibre lasers and wavelengths of light like those standard in telecommunications.
Technology milestone
"Single-cycle pulse generation with an essentially all-fibre system clearly marks a milestone in optical technology," says Martin Fermann of laser manufacturer Imra America, who was not involved with the work. He expects "the single-cycle regime will become a new standard" with applications in advanced imaging, sensing and signal processing.
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