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K-State Today

April 28, 2015

Recent physics article highlighted in prestigious Nature Photonics journal

Submitted by Kim Coy

A recent article spearheaded by the J.R. Macdonald Laboratory in the physics department, under the leadership of Carlos A. Trallero, assistant professor of physics, has been highlighted by Nature Photonics, one of the highest academic influential journals in science.

This highlight recognizes the significance of this article's stated scientific accomplishments and pathway to potential applications. The article, originally published in Optics Express, volume 23, page 4,563, reports the design of the latest pulsed laser system, named HITS, installed at the J.R. Macdonald Laboratory.

The system boasts carrier–envelope phase, or CEP, stability at high laser pulse energies, being the first laser to have both long-term CEP stability and peak powers that put it in the terawatt regime. This development paves the way for potential applications in future ultrafast optics development as well as in atomic and molecular physics.

Achieving this high degree of stability was enabled in part by the university's recent investment to improve the J.R. Macdonald Laboratory laser environments. The co-authors of the original paper from Kansas State University are Trallero; Ren Xiaoming postdoctoral fellow, physics; Derrek J. Wilson, graduate student, physics; Adam M. Summers, graduate student, physics; Stefan Zigo, graduate student, physics; Shuting Lei, professor, industrial and manufacturing systems engineering; Kevin D. Carnes, research professor, physics; Vinod Kumarappan, associate professor, physics; and Itzik Ben-Itzhak, university distinguished professor, physics.