This innovation was carried out by Jaafar together with researchers from the German Electron Acceleration Center DESY. The famous American scientific journal OPTICA published the results of the research.
According to the research, the new laser will be widely used, from measuring the signatures of certain molecules and measuring unknown optical frequencies to detecting distant exoplanets.
Innovation Details
Dr. Mahmoud Jaafar, who is currently working as an associate professor of light physics in Germany, singled out “Sky News Arabia” when talking about the details of his new innovation, saying:
The measurement of time has become an essential part of daily life, and the whole world is currently focusing on finding more precise, faster, less expensive and smaller means of measurement. Accuracy of a minute or seconds is usually sufficient for most human activities, but extremely precise timekeeping plays a vital role in many other aspects of the modern world. The smaller the time measurement error, the smaller the distance estimation error, for example, a timing error of 1 nanosecond (or 1 billionth of a second) results in a position error of about 30cm. This is a very large distance for modern applications that require attosecond time resolution (a billion times smaller than a nanosecond). Thus, GPS satellites broadcast time signals from on-board atomic clocks, which allow vehicles, ships and planes to know their position with an accuracy of a few meters. Unfortunately, atomic clocks are large and expensive, and only large measurement laboratories have them. On the other hand, optical clocks are cheaper and less complicated than atomic clocks, and the vibration speed of light clocks is 50,000 times that of standard atomic clocks, thus dividing time into smaller units and being more accurate than atomic clocks. But in reality no electronic system can directly account for these rapid oscillations. This is where comes the role and importance of the so-called pulsed laser sources or optical frequency comb, which divide the vibrations of light clocks into low frequencies that can be counted with great precision using currently available electronic devices. . These sources are high-precision instruments that were part of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics, as these instruments allowed the most precise measurements ever made in the world. Despite the enormous applications of conventional pulsed laser sources, they are large in size and cannot support many recent technological advances based on silicon wafers.
The importance of the new laser
Mahmoud Jaafar explains the importance of the laser he invented with his team:
Here is the role of what we have achieved with my colleagues from the German Electron Acceleration Center DESY, by developing a modern generation of these devices called “microcomb Fabry-Perot” which is 100 times smaller than the thickness of a strand of hair. Unlike traditional laser sources, this new generation is characterized by a radical reduction in energy consumption in optical communication systems, in addition to its very fast frequency rate of up to terahertz (one thousand billion pulses per second) . This innovation paves the way for new applications, particularly in wireless optical communications, and will meet the ever-increasing consumer demand for high-speed digital communications.
Jaafar pointed out that he and his colleagues are “the first to develop this type of pulsed micro-laser in a way that overcomes many previously known limitations in this field with distinctive characteristics.”
He concluded: “It is possible to use these new devices they invented in other applications, such as the calibration of spectrometers used in astronomical observatories, high-resolution spectroscopy and optical communications.
Who is Mahmoud Jaafar?
Mahmoud Gaafar graduated from the Faculty of Sciences of Menoufia University in 2008 with honors. He obtained a master’s degree in physics from the United Institute of Nuclear Research in Moscow in 2012. Later, he obtained a doctorate in laser physics from the University of Marburg, Germany, when he was only 28 years old. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Hamburg University of Technology, Germany. Jaafar, 36, is currently working as a researcher at the German Electron Acceleration Center DESY, as part of a European Union project.
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