Crystalline Super Mirrors For Trace Gas Detection In Medicine And Environmental Sciences
In an international cooperation with partners from industry and research, physicists from the University of Vienna, together with Thorlabs, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Kansas, succeeded for the first time in creating high-power laser mirrors in the important wavelength range of demonstrate mid-infrared, which absorb less than ten out of a million photons. Manufactured in a new process based on crystalline materials, these low-loss mirrors promise completely new fields of application, for example in optical respiratory gas analysis for early cancer detection or the detection of greenhouse gases. The work on this will be published in the current issue of the journal "Optica".