Researchers use jellyfish proteins to develop new laser
In what is being hailed as a major breakthrough in the field of laser technology, scientists have, for the first time, developed laser from fluorescent jellyfish proteins grown in bacteria. This next-generation laser has the potential to be way more compact and efficient than conventional ones found today. It could even open up research avenues in optical computing and quantum physics.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the material properties of fluorescent proteins,” said Malte Gather, a professor at the University of St. Andrews, who helped invent the laser. “They have a very special molecular structure that is unlike the structure of any of the synthetic materials that we use.”
Present polariton laser techniques require very low temperature to function. Organic materials are used in a majority of displays, OLED or Organic Light Emitting Diode being the most common among them. OLED displays do work at normal room temperatures, but they require picosecond light pulses to power them up.
“Polariton lasers have had to be operated at very, very low temperatures — below the temperature at which nitrogen gas becomes a liquid — which is not very convenient,” Gather explained.
These constraints are
one of the areas the new jellyfish protein-based improves on previous polariton lasers, since it can be operated at room temperature.By re-purposing the fluorescent proteins that have revolutionized biomedical imaging, and by allowing scientists to monitor processes inside cells, the team created a polariton laser that operates at room temperature powered by nanosecond pulses – just billionths of a second.
“Picosecond pulses of a suitable energy are about a thousandfold more difficult to make than nanosecond pulses, so it really simplifies making these polariton lasers quite significantly,” said Malte Gather, a professor at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and one of the laser’s inventors.
Gather and colleagues genetically engineered E. coli bacteria to produce enhanced green fluorescent protein (eGFP). The researchers filled optical microcavities with this protein before subjecting them to “optical pumping,” where nanosecond flashes of light are used to bring the system up to the required energy to create laser light.
After reaching the threshold for polariton lasing, pumping more energy into the device resulted in conventional lasing.
This helps confirm that the first emission was due to polariton lasing, Gather said, which is something other approaches using organic materials have been unable to demonstrate so far.
The research was published in the journal Science Advances.
