Novel Laser Technology for Microchip-Size Chemical Sensors
(World News Austria)

Most lasers have only one color. All the photons it emits have exactly the same wavelength. However, there are also lasers whose light is more complicated. If it consists of many different frequencies, with equal intervals in between, just like the teeth of a comb, it is referred to as a `frequency comb`. Frequency combs are perfect for detecting a variety of chemical substances. At TU Wien (Vienna), this special type of laser light is now used to enable chemical analysis on tiny spaces - it is a millimeter-format chemistry lab. With this new patent-pending technology, frequency combs can be created on a single chip in a very simple and robust manner. This work has now been presented in the...