This book presents the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary review of the rapidly developing field of air lasing. In most applications of lasers, such as cutting and engraving, the laser source is brought to the point of service where the laser beam is needed to perform its function. However, in some important applications such as remote atmospheric sensing, placing the laser at a convenient location is not an option. Current sensing schemes rely on the detection of weak backscattering of ground-based, forward-propagating optical probes, and possess limited sensitivity. The concept of air lasing (or atmospheric lasing) relies on the idea that the constituents of the air itself can be used as an active laser medium, creating a backward-propagating, impulsive, laser-like radiation emanating from a remote location in the atmosphere. This book provides important insights into the current state of development of air lasing and its applications.

Photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technology holds great potential for breaking through the bottlenecks in current photonic and optoelectronic networks. Recently, a revolution has been witnessed in the field of lithium niobate (LN) photonics. Over the past decade, nanoscale LN waveguides with a propagation loss of ~0.01 dB and a radius of curvature on the level of ~100 m have been demonstrated. The revolution mainly benefits from two technological advancements, the maturity of lithium-niobate-on-insulator (LNOI) technology and the innovation of nanofabrication approaches of high-quality LNOI photonic structures. Using low-loss waveguides and high-quality-factor (high-Q) microresonators produced on the LNOI platform as building blocks, various integrated photonic devices have been demonstrated with unprecedented performances. The breakthroughs have reshaped the landscape of the LN industry. This is the first monograph on LN nanophotonics enabled by the LNOI platform. It comprehensively reviews the development of fabrication technology, investigations on nonlinear optical processes, and demonstrations of electro-optical devices, as well as applications in quantum light sources, spectroscopy, sensing, and microwave-to-optical wave conversion. The book begins with an overview of the technological evolution of PICs, justifying the motivation for developing LNOI photonics. The next four chapters focus on LNOI photonics. The book concludes with a summary of the milestone achievements discussed in these chapters and provides a future perspective of this area of research.

Femtosecond lasers opened up new avenue in materials processing due to its unique features of ultrashort pulse width and extremely high peak intensity. One of the most important features of femtosecond laser processing is that strong absorption can be induced even by materials which are transparent to the femtosecond laser beam due to nonlinear multiphoton absorption. The multiphoton absorption allows us to perform not only surface but also three-dimensionally internal microfabrication of transparent materials such as glass. This capability makes it possible to directly fabricate three-dimensional microfluidics, micromechanics, microelectronics and microoptics embedded in the glass. Further, these microcomponents can be easily integrated in a single glass microchip by the simple procedure using the femtosecond laser. Thus, the femtosecond laser processing provides some advantages over conventional methods such as traditional semiconductor processing or soft lithography for fabrication of microfluidic, optofludic and lab-on-a-chip devices and thereby many researches on this topic are currently being carried out. This book presents a comprehensive review on the state of the art and future prospects of femtosecond laser processing for fabrication of microfluidics and optofludics including principle of femtosecond laser processing, detailed fabrication procedures of each microcomponent and practical applications to biochemical analysis.

Over the past few decades, the rapid development of ultrafast lasers, such as femtosecond lasers and picosecond lasers, has opened up new avenues for material processing due to their unique features such as ultrashort pulse width and extremely high peak intensity. These techniques have become a common tool for micro- and nanoprocessing of a variety of materials and are now widely used for both fundamental researches and practical applications.

This book is composed of 12 chapters covering relevant topics of ultrafast laser processing, including laser itself and novel beam manipulation methods for processing, fundamentals of ultrafast laser processing, nanomaterial synthesis, surface micro- and nanostructuring, micromachining, two-photon photopolymerization, internal modification/fabrication of transparent materials, applications to photonic devices and microchips for biological analysis, industrial applications, and so on. Each chapter is written by world-leading scientists in the related field so as to give comprehensive reviews in the field of ultrafast laser micro- and nanoprocessing.

This book presents the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary review of the rapidly developing field of air lasing. In most applications of lasers, such as cutting and engraving, the laser source is brought to the point of service where the laser beam is needed to perform its function. However, in some important applications such as remote atmospheric sensing, placing the laser at a convenient location is not an option. Current sensing schemes rely on the detection of weak backscattering of ground-based, forward-propagating optical probes, and possess limited sensitivity. The concept of air lasing (or atmospheric lasing) relies on the idea that the constituents of the air itself can be used as an active laser medium, creating a backward-propagating, impulsive, laser-like radiation emanating from a remote location in the atmosphere. This book provides important insights into the current state of development of air lasing and its applications.

Microbiochips, such as a lab-on-a-chip (LOC) devices and micro total analysis systems, can be regarded conceptually as a biological equivalent of conventional silicon integrated circuits, which involve miniaturization and integration of electronics. As its name implies, an ideal LOC should have a very small footprint and yet still be capable of functioning as a laboratory in which partial or complete chemical or biological analysis can be performed automatically. This book provides an overview of 3D femtosecond laser direct writing technology and highlight its potential for fabrication of complex smart microsystems by furnishing some examples of fabrication and hybrid integration of microfluidics, micromechanics, photonics, and electronics.