Caltech Professor and KNI Board member Kerry Vahala, together with scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ), has created the first-ever phonon laser—a device that amplifies phonons in much the way that optical lasers amplify photons of light. A phonon is the smallest discrete unit of vibrational energy—the vibrational equivalent of a photon; and amplification in both the photon and phonon lasers results from a process called stimulated emission. The techniques that led to the phonon laser's creation had been published in Nature Physics.
