Yves Bellouard’s Galatea laboratory at EPFL is at the crossroads between optics, mechanics and materials science, and femtosecond lasers is a crucial element of this work. Femtosecond lasers produce extremely short and regular bursts of laser light and have many applications such as laser eye surgery, nonlinear microscopy, spectroscopy, laser material processing and sustainable data storage.

Using a commercial femtosecond laser, the scientists etch out special grooves in the glass substrate that allow for the precise placement of the essential components of their laser. The initial etching is designed so that one mirror sits in a groove with micromechanical flexures engineered to locally stir the mirror when exposed to the same coherent light. In this way, the commercial femtosecond laser is used a second time, this time to align the mirrors, and ultimately create a stable, small scale femtosecond laser.

The alignment process is still supervised by a human operator, and with practice can take a few hours to achieve. Despite its small size, the laser is capable of reaching approximatively 1kW of peak power and of emitting pulses of less than 200fs, barely enough time for light to travel across a human hair.

This novel laser technology is to be spun-off by Cassio-P, a company to be headed by Antoine Delgoffe at Galatea Lab, who joined the project at a decisive stage with the mission of finalizing the proof-of-concept into a future commercial device.

“A femtosecond laser replicating itself, are we perhaps reaching the point of self-cloning manufactured devices?” concludes Dr. Bellouard.

www.epfl.ch