A newly-developed material made of optical fibers could soon lead to constructing laser devices operating at more different frequencies simultaneously.

The newly-created material (cesium zirconium phosphorus selenium - CsZrPSe6) is able to add, subtract or double laser beam wavelengths, thus allowing for the development of devices that would use two sources of laser in order to yield more usable wavelengths.

Mercouri Kanatzidis, a scientist from the Argonne National Laboratory states that “Lasers today are basically limited to six frequencies, but our new material will double any frequency in the far visible and the near-infrared and infrared. It not only doubles frequencies, but when you use two lasers to put in two frequencies, you also get out their sum and difference. So with two lasers you could generate all the frequencies”. Among the prospects for the usage of this materials, researchers from the Argonne National Laboratory indicate the development of some sensors that would detect chemical and biological weapons.

"This compound is made with heavy elements -selenium, zirconium and cesium - elements that couple to light much more effectively, causing their harmonics to be much more intense, so the efficiency with which this material produces second harmonics is much, much higher than anything we have seen before," explained Kanatzidis. As he reveals, "this compound has been able to emit double frequency beams 15 times more intense than the ones obtained with the best of the current commercial materials. Referring to the structure of the material". He added that "What we found with the APS [Advanced Photon Source] is that the compounds crystals are one-dimensional, and extend forever with very thin molecular dimensions".

The material was found to be growing naturally in individual long fibers. Next, the scientists plan to obtain one meter-long fibers instead of the centimeter-long ones developed until now.