The University of Cambridge has been awarded £2.4M by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under the Basic Technology Research Initiative for the development of microscopic lasers with applications in a broad range of fields including cancer detection and telecommunications. This is a multidisciplinary collaborative research project between the Department of Engineering, the Department of Physics and the Department of Chemistry.

The new lasers, based on liquid crystals and light emitting polymers, will combine the best features of dye, gas and diode lasers. Dye lasers can be tuned to emit different wavelengths, but they are big. Gas lasers are powerful and stable, but they cannot be tuned and are also rather large. Diode lasers, such as those used in CD and DVD players, are small but cannot be tuned.

These new lasers will be extremely small in size - less than the width of a human hair. They will be stable and emit very pure light, because they will not hop from one mode of emissions to another. It will be possible to tune them to any wavelength from ultraviolet to infrared simply by sending an electrical signal to them. It should also be possible to manufacture them at extremely low cost.

The lasers will find use in medical science given their small size, tuneability and low cost. They may be incorporated into fibre optics and this could provide applications in dermatology, cancer and diabetes detection as well as the possibility of using them in the 'lab on a chip' technology. These devices will combine spectroscopic measurement and analysis on a single chip making it possible for medical staff, environmental officers and others to conduct sophisticated analyses in the field rather than send samples to a lab and wait for the results.

The potential applications span many other different technology areas including telecommunications devices and the booming display market for products such as televisions, computers and mobile phones. The lasers are small enough to enable them to be used as individual light sources in a mega-pixel array. They can be switched ultra-fast and can provide bright pure light of any colour leading to highly efficient, very low energy consuming devices.

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