Space-Ready Chip-Integrated Titanium:Sapphire Lasers

Brightlight Photonics proposes to develop a universal nanophotonic laser solution in the wavelength ranges 675 - 1000 nm and 375 - 475 nm for quantum technologies including optical atomic clocks, cold atom interferometers, and solid-state quantum sensors. The wavelength range 675 - 1000 nm will be addressed by a single, wideband Titanium:Sapphire (Ti:Sapphire) gain medium, integrated onto a nanophotonic chip. On-chip frequency doubling with thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) will further extend the range to 375 - 475 nm. One of the major impediments to compactifying atomic clocks, interferometry setups, and solid state sensors is their common reliance on bulky, expensive lasers. Chip-integration of high-performance lasers below 1 micron wavelength remains an outstanding challenge. Reducing this critical barrier to adoption of optical atomic clocks in space applications could enable deep-space navigation, explorations of dark matter, gravitational waves, and tests of general relativity as well as cold atom interferometers for inertial navigation and next-generation gravimeters. Our target foothold into commercial applications is optical atomic clocks for inertial navigation. The current atomic clock market is roughly $500 million annually, with the low-SWaP portion growing rapidly to accommodate the DoD need to operate in frequency-jammed theaters. At the same time we aim to diversify our commercial approach by establishing ourselves as a component supplier for cold atom quantum processors: reducing optical setups from rack-mounted lasers splaying across complex optical tables to an on-chip light source package integrated with EOMs. The SBIR Phase I funds will be used to build a low-linewidth demonstration laser locked to a rubidium vapor cell. We will also design high-gain on-chip amplifiers, explore pump-diode optimization, analyze the feasibility of integrating on-chip modulation components, and study the potential NASA needs of our technology.

It has proven particularly difficult to operationalize let alone commercialize many quantum technologies due to their SWaP-C. Major engineering efforts have focused on miniaturizing quantum assemblies: shrinking experiments that span optical tables into form factors that can be deployed on ships, planes, and satellites. Narrow-linewidth integrated lasers are important for a wide array of NASA needs: Deep-space navigation using optical atomic clocks: historically, spacecraft need two-way communication with atomic clocks on earth to be able to accurately calculate their position. With round-trip communication times to mars taking tens of minutes, this leads to an untenable delay in position calculations. Embedding atomic clocks in satellites eliminates a degree of freedom in the kinematic equations and enables real-time determination of spacecraft position upon immediate reception of a signal from earth. Fundamental physics: optical atomic clocks in orbit avoid tidal motion and reduce gravitational-noise, enabling tests of general relativity. Atomic clocks can also be used to understand the coupling of dark matter to standard model fields and particles and for gravitational wave detection. Cold-atom interferometers (CAIs): CAIs have the potential to enable new sensing modalities important to NASA. Similar to atomic clocks, CAIs could prove pivotal to inertial navigation. CAI gyroscopes are projected to attain 3-order of magnitude improvement over currently deployed technologies, and the systems are further beneficial for space applications due to their projected lifetimes. Similar principles can be used to attain next-generation gravimeters to replace the GRACE FO mission, as outlined in the NASA decadal strategy. These CAI systems currently rely on table-sized optics packages to cool, trap, and control atoms–frequently rubidium–that need to be miniaturized to enable low-SWaP, deployable systems. The value of the atomic clock market was roughly $500 million in 2023 and is projected to grow by nearly 50% in the next 5 years. Optical clocks are the timing technology of the future (with the first commercial product launched just last year), offering better resolution compared to current technology such as microwave clocks. A sufficiently small optical atomic clock that can achieve the dead-reckoning precision required to operate in GPS-denied environments is needed on nearly all forms of military vehicles. Self-driving cars and autonomous robots would likewise benefit. Our long-term goal to build a fully-on-chip atomic clock, interfacing a Ti:Sapphire pump laser with micro-machined atomic cells, would address this broad market. Additionally, high performance lasers are at the heart of cold atom quantum processors. Companies building cold atom quantum computers have raised over $250 million, and cold atom processors recently surpassed the published world record logical qubit count by over an order-of-magnitude. Reducing the optical setups’ complexity through integrated lasers would enable larger qubit counts with less degrees of freedom to couple to noise. We plan to initially work with the Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms (CUA) to demonstrate feasibility. Furthermore Ti:Sapphire lasers could also be used for two-photon microscopy and optical coherence tomography (OCT), both in academic labs as well as for ophthalmic surgery, skin non-invasive biopsies, and cancer detection. On-chip Ti:Sapphire is particularly well-suited for endoscopic procedures and reducing cost to enable procedures in currently under-served hospitals and clinics. Further, frequencies between 0.3-30 THz are coined the “THz Gap” in part because the dominant method to produce radiation in this regime, photoconductive antennas, were bulky and expensive due to the Ti:Sapphire light source.

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