Dr David Moss was awarded the 2011 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science.
Computing and medicine are among the many fields which could be revolutionised by a new form of ultra-small laser. The innovation was created by an international team of scientists, including David Moss , from the University of Sydney's School of Physics. Featured on the front cover of the prestigious journal Nature on 4 April, it is the first laser to be mode-locked making it highly precise, ultra-fast and ultra-small. "Our new laser opens up a whole field of possibilities in terms of high precision, ultra-small, integrated lasers," said Moss, who is based at CUDOS - the ARC Centre of Excellence for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems - and the Institute of Photonics and Optical Science at the University of Sydney. "It's the first time we've been able to use a micro-cavity resonator to lock the modes of a laser, which is how ultra-short pulsed lasers are created. Lasers that have their modes locked generate the shortest optical pulses of light," explained Moss. Making lasers that can pulse at very high and flexible repetition rates - much higher than those achieved with electronics - is a field that has been pursued by scientists around the world.
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