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The light output of microscopic lasers has been increased a thousandfold by a
team from Bell Labs and Yale University in the US and the Max Planck Institute
of Physics in Germany. Earlier devices emitted light around the edge of a
semiconductor disc a few micrometres wide and a fraction of a micrometre thick.
In last week’s Science (vol 280, p 1556) the researchers announce their
new design, a cylinder 70 micrometres wide designed to reflect light chaotically
inside it. This produces an emission pattern shaped like a bow tie, which
generates four laser beams, each of about 10 milliwatts, from the points of the
bow.