PASADENA, Calif., Dec. 13, 2021 — Researchers at Caltech have reported success using lasers to dramatically sculpt the properties of materials without the production of excess heat, which can damage the materials.
“These tools could let you transform the electronic properties of materials at the flick of a light switch,” said David Hsieh, a professor of physics at Caltech. “But the technologies have been limited by the problem of the lasers creating too much heat in the materials.”
“The lasers required for these experiments are very powerful so it’s hard to not heat up and damage the materials,” said graduate student Junyi Shan. “On the one hand, we want the material to be subjected to very intense laser light. On the other hand, we don’t want the material to absorb any of that light at all.”
A strong laser is seen illuminating a material in a low-temperature chamber. The laser is being used to change the material’s degree of transparency. Courtesy of David Hsieh Laboratory, Caltech.
To get around the bottleneck, the team fine-tuned the frequency of a laser in such a way that it markedly changed a material’s properties without imparting any unwanted heat. The team also found what it called an ideal material to demonstrate the technique: manganese phosphor trisulfide — a semiconductor that naturally absorbs only a small amount of light over a broad range of infrared frequencies.
For its experiments, the team used intense infrared laser pulses, each lasting about 1013...
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