"Quantum cascade lasers: widely tailorable light sources for the mid- to far-infrared and their applications"

The unipolar nature of quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) combined with the capabilities of electronic and photonic bandstructure engineering leads to unprecedented design flexibility and functionality for a variety of applications. The author first reviews the state-of-the art performance across the mid-IR and far-IR spectrum and advances in commercial applications. Recent exciting developments on new coherent light sources with an active nonlinear medium that combines internal pumping with a giant resonant optical nonlinearity to achieve high conversion efficiency (second harmonic generators, Raman lasers, etc) will be presented. The talk concludes with a discussion of terahertz, ultrabroadband, and "holey"/photonic crystal QCLs along with potential applications