New high-performance ultrafast lasers are being made on nanophotonic chips. The new work centers on miniaturizing mode-lock lasers — a unique laser that emits a train of ultrashort, coherent light pulses in femtosecond intervals, which is an astonishing quadrillionth of a second. Ultrafast mode-locked lasers are indispensable to unlocking the secrets of the fastest timescales …
