High-pulse-energy integrated mode-locked laser using a Mamyshev oscillator
6 affiliations
- 1Institute of Electrical and Microengineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
- 2Institute of Physics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
- 3EDWATEC SA, EPFL Innovation Park, Lausanne, Switzerland
- 4Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), Dresden, Germany
- 5Institute of Electrical and Microengineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. [email protected]
- 6Institute of Physics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. [email protected]
Abstract
Ultrafast lasers have led to numerous advances across science and technology: they enabled corneal surgery 1 , revealed chemical reaction dynamics 2 and triggered the development of optical atomic clocks 3 . Over the past decades, extensive efforts have aimed to realize mode-locked lasers based on photonic integrated circuits (PICs) that are compact, manufactured at wafer scale and are compatible with further on-chip functionalities 4–6 . Yet, existing demonstrations to date lack the pulse energy required to drive nonlinear processes, such as supercontinuum generation. Here we demonstrate a mode-locked laser that overcomes this challenge through the use of erbium-ion-implanted silicon nitride PICs 7 . The laser is based on the Mamyshev oscillator architecture 8 , in which alternating spectral filtering and self-phase modulation enable mode-locking and can support large nonlinear phase shifts 9 . It operates without external seeding, delivering a 176-MHz pulse train with nanojoule pulse energy, comparable with fibre lasers and exceeding previous PIC-based sources by two orders of magnitude. The output exhibits high coherence, can be linearly compressed to 147 fs and can directly drive a 1.5-octave-spanning supercontinuum in a Si 3 N 4 waveguide, without any further amplification. A compact terahertz time-domain spectrometer driven by this source achieved a bandwidth of 5 THz and a 90-dB dynamic range. We demonstrate its application in non-contact chemical analysis and inspection. Our results show the potential of an integrated ultrafast laser, with applications ranging from chip-scale frequency metrology to portable spectroscopy systems.
Related
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BibTeX
@article{qiu2026highpulseenergy,
title = {{High-pulse-energy integrated mode-locked laser using a Mamyshev oscillator}},
author = {Zheru Qiu and Xuan Yang and Xurong Li and Jianqi Hu and Zhongshu Liu and Yichi Zhang and Xinru Ji and Jiale Sun and Grigory Lihachev and Zihan Li and Ulrich Kentsch and Tobias Jan Kippenberg},
journal = {Nature},
year = {2026},
month = jun,
doi = {10.1038/s41586-026-10517-4},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10517-4},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - High-pulse-energy integrated mode-locked laser using a Mamyshev oscillator
AU - Zheru Qiu
AU - Xuan Yang
AU - Xurong Li
AU - Jianqi Hu
AU - Zhongshu Liu
AU - Yichi Zhang
AU - Xinru Ji
AU - Jiale Sun
AU - Grigory Lihachev
AU - Zihan Li
AU - Ulrich Kentsch
AU - Tobias Jan Kippenberg
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/06/03
JO - Nature
DO - 10.1038/s41586-026-10517-4
UR - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10517-4
AB - Ultrafast lasers have led to numerous advances across science and technology: they enabled corneal surgery 1 , revealed chemical reaction dynamics 2 and triggered the development of optical atomic clocks 3 . Over the past decades, extensive efforts have aimed to realize mode-locked lasers based on photonic integrated circuits (PICs) that are compact, manufactured at wafer scale and are compatible with further on-chip functionalities 4–6 . Yet, existing demonstrations to date lack the pulse energy required to drive nonlinear processes, such as supercontinuum generation. Here we demonstrate a mode-locked laser that overcomes this challenge through the use of erbium-ion-implanted silicon nitride PICs 7 . The laser is based on the Mamyshev oscillator architecture 8 , in which alternating spectral filtering and self-phase modulation enable mode-locking and can support large nonlinear phase shifts 9 . It operates without external seeding, delivering a 176-MHz pulse train with nanojoule pulse energy, comparable with fibre lasers and exceeding previous PIC-based sources by two orders of magnitude. The output exhibits high coherence, can be linearly compressed to 147 fs and can directly drive a 1.5-octave-spanning supercontinuum in a Si 3 N 4 waveguide, without any further amplification. A compact terahertz time-domain spectrometer driven by this source achieved a bandwidth of 5 THz and a 90-dB dynamic range. We demonstrate its application in non-contact chemical analysis and inspection. Our results show the potential of an integrated ultrafast laser, with applications ranging from chip-scale frequency metrology to portable spectroscopy systems.
SN - 0028-0836
SN - 1476-4687
ER -