The modern optoelectronics industry has been working to make its devices, from computer systems to sensors and lidar, more compact. To do this, lasers, transistors and other components must be made smaller. A team of scientists led by ITMO researchers has come up with a fast and inexpensive way to make optical chips in a petri dish. The study was published in ACS Nano.
Today, devices based on microscopic lasers and optical chips are becoming more and more common. They are used in the production of lidar, in the development of new biosensors, and in the future they could be the basis for new optical computers that use photons rather than electrons to transmit and process information. Today's optical chips work in the infrared, meaning they emit laser light at wavelengths that the human eye cannot see.

"But in order to make the device more compact, we need to work in visibility because the size of the chip depends on the wavelength of its emission," said Sergey Makarov, lead researcher at ITMO's Department of Physics and Engineering.
Optical chip is composed of laser and waveguide. Although it is easy to create a light source with green or red parts of the emission spectrum, waveguides of these wavelengths can be a problem.