Bridging light and electrons

An artistic rendering of a beam of free electrons interacting with an optical pulse in a ring-shaped microresonator. Credit: Ryan Allen / Second Bay Studios. Researchers at EPFL and Max Plank have merged nonlinear optics with electron microscopy, unlocking new capabilities in material studies and the control of electron beams. When light goes through a material, it often behaves in unpredictable ways. This phenomenon is the subject of an entire field of study called "nonlinear optics", which is now integral to technological and scientific advances from laser development and optical frequency metrology, to gravitational wave astronomy and quantum information science. In addition, recent years have seen nonlinear optics applied in optical signal processing, telecommunications, sensing, spectroscopy, light detection and ranging. All these applications involve the miniaturization of devices that manipulate light in nonlinear ways onto a small chip, enabling complex light interactions chip-scale.