Researchers have made a breakthrough in the control of terahertz quantum cascade lasers, which could lead to the transmission of data at the rate of 100 gigabits per second - around one thousand times quicker than a fast Ethernet operating at 100 megabits a second.

What distinguishes terahertz quantum cascade lasers from other lasers is the fact that they emit light in the terahertz range of the electromagnetic spectrum. They have applications in the field of spectroscopy where they are used in chemical analysis.

The lasers could also eventually provide ultra-fast, short-hop wireless links where large datasets have to be transferred across hospital campuses or between research facilities on universities - or in satellite communications.

To be able to send data at these increased speeds, the lasers need to be modulated very rapidly: switching on and off or pulsing around 100 billion times every second.

Engineers and scientists have so far failed to develop a way of achieving this.

A research team from the University of Leeds and University of Nottingham believe they have found a way of delivering ultra-fast modulation, by combining the power of acoustic and light waves.  

John Cunningham, Professor of Nanoelectronics at Leeds, said: "This is exciting research. At the moment, the system for modulating a quantum cascade laser is electrically driven - but that system has limitations. 

"Ironically, the same electronics that deliver the modulation usually puts a brake on the speed of the modulation. The mechanism we are developing relies instead on acoustic waves."

A quantum cascade laser is very efficient. As an electron passes through the optical component of the laser, it goes through a series of 'quantum wells' where the energy level of the electron drops and a photon or pulse of light energy is emitted.

One electron is capable of emitting multiple photons. It is this process that is controlled during the modulation.

Instead of using external electronics, the teams of researchers at Leeds and Nottingham Universities used acoustic waves to vibrate the quantum wells inside the quantum cascade laser.

The acoustic waves were generated by the impact of a pulse from another laser onto an aluminum film. This caused the film to expand and contract, sending a mechanical wave through the quantum cascade laser.

Tony Kent, Professor of Physics at Nottingham said "Essentially, what we did was use the acoustic wave to shake the intricate electronic states inside the quantum cascade laser. We could then see that its terahertz light output was being altered by the acoustic wave." {module INSIDE STORY}

Professor Cunningham added: "We did not reach a situation where we could stop and start the flow completely, but we were able to control the light output by a few percents, which is a great start.

"We believe that with further refinement, we will be able to develop a new mechanism for complete control of the photon emissions from the laser, and perhaps even integrate structures generating sound with the terahertz laser so that no external sound source is needed."

Professor Kent said: "This result opens a new area for physics and engineering to come together in the exploration of the interaction of terahertz sound and light waves, which could have real technological applications."

A team of astronomers led by Brendan Bowler of The University of Texas at Austin has probed the formation process of giant exoplanets and brown dwarfs, a class of objects that are more massive than giant planets, but not massive enough to ignite nuclear fusion in their cores to shine like true stars.

Using direct imaging with ground-based telescopes in Hawaii - W. M. Keck Observatory and Subaru Telescope on Maunakea - the team studied the orbits of these faint companions orbiting stars in 27 systems. These data, combined with modeling of the orbits, allowed them to determine that the brown dwarfs in these systems formed like stars, but the gas giants formed like planets.

The research is published in the current issue of The Astronomical Journal.

In the last two decades, technological leaps have allowed telescopes to separate the light from a parent star and a much-dimmer orbiting object. In 1995, this new capability produced the first direct images of a brown dwarf orbiting a star. The first direct image of planets orbiting another star followed in 2008.

"Over the past 20 years, we've been leaping down and down in mass," Bowler said of the direct imaging capability, noting that the current limit is about 1 Jupiter mass. As technology has improved, "One of the big questions that have emerged is 'What's the nature of the companions we're finding?'" {module INSIDE STORY}

Brown dwarfs, as defined by astronomers, have masses between 13 and 75 Jupiter masses. They have characteristics in common with both planets and with stars, and Bowler and his team wanted to settle the question: Are gas giant planets on the outer fringes of planetary systems the tip of the planetary iceberg, or the low-mass end of brown dwarfs? Past research has shown that brown dwarfs orbiting stars likely formed like low-mass stars, but it's been less clear what is the lowest mass companion this formation mechanism can produce.

"One way to get at this is to study the dynamics of the system -- to look at the orbits," Bowler said. Their orbits today hold the key to unlocking their evolution.{module INSIDE STORY}

Using Keck Observatory's adaptive optics (AO) system with the Near-Infrared Camera, second-generation (NIRC2) instrument on the Keck II telescope, as well as the Subaru Telescope, Bowler's team took images of giant planets and brown dwarfs as they orbit their parent stars.

It's a long process. The gas giants and brown dwarfs they studied are so distant from their parent stars that one orbit may take hundreds of years. To determine even a small percentage of the orbit, "You take an image, you wait a year," for the faint companion to travel a bit, Bowler said. Then "you take another image, you wait another year."

This research relied on AO technology, which allows astronomers to correct for distortions caused by the Earth's atmosphere. As AO instruments have continually improved over the past three decades, more brown dwarfs and giant planets have been directly imaged. But since most of these discoveries have been made over the past decade or two, the team only has images corresponding to a few percents of each object's total orbit. They combined their new observations of 27 systems with all of the previous observations published by other astronomers or available in telescope archives. 

At this point, supercomputer modeling comes in. Coauthors on this paper have helped create an orbit-fitting code called "Orbitize!" which uses Kepler's laws of planetary motion to identify which types of orbits are consistent with the measured positions, and which are not. 

The code generates a set of possible orbits for each companion. The slight motion of each giant planet or brown dwarf forms a "cloud" of possible orbits. The smaller the cloud, the more astronomers are closing in on the companion's true orbit. And more data points -- that is, more direct images of each object as it orbits -- will refine the shape of the orbit.

"Rather than wait decades or centuries for a planet to complete one orbit, we can make up for the shorter time baseline of our data with very accurate position measurements," said team member Eric Nielsen of Stanford University. "A part of Orbitize! that we developed specifically to fit partial orbits, OFTI [Orbits For The Impatient], allowed us to find orbits even for the longest period companions."

Finding the shape of the orbit is key: Objects that have more circular orbits probably formed like planets. That is when a cloud of gas and dust collapsed to form a star, the distant companion (and any other planets) formed out of a flattened disk of gas and dust rotating around that star. {module INSIDE STORY}

On the other hand, the ones that have more elongated orbits probably formed like stars. In this scenario, a clump of gas and dust was collapsing to form a star, but it fractured into two clumps. Each clump then collapsed, one forming a star, and the other a brown dwarf orbiting around that star. This is essentially a binary star system, albeit containing one real star and one "failed star."

"Even though these companions are millions of years old, the memory of how they formed is still encoded in their present-day eccentricity," Nielsen added. Eccentricity is a measure of how circular or elongated an object's orbit is.

The results of the team's study of 27 distant companions were unambiguous. 

"The punchline is, we found that when you divide these objects at this canonical boundary of more than about 15 Jupiter masses, the things that we've been calling planets do indeed have more circular orbits, as a population, compared to the rest," Bowler said. "And the rest look like binary stars."

The future of this work involves both continuing to monitor these 27 objects, as well as identifying new ones to widen the study. "The sample size is still modest, at the moment," Bowler said. His team is using the Gaia satellite to look for additional candidates to follow up using direct imaging with even greater sensitivity at the forthcoming Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) and other facilities. UT-Austin is a founding member of the GMT collaboration.

Bowler's team's results reinforce similar conclusions recently reached by the GPIES direct imaging survey with the Gemini Planet Imager, which found evidence for a different formation channel for brown dwarfs and giant planets based on their statistical properties.

This work was supported by a NASA Keck PI Data Award, administered by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. The Keck Observatory is managed by Caltech and the University of California.