Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed chip-scale devices for simultaneously manipulating the color, focus, direction of travel, and polarization of multiple beams of laser light.

The ability to tailor those properties using a single chip is essential for fabricating a new class of portable sensors that could measure such fundamental quantities as rotation, acceleration, time, and magnetic fields with unprecedented accuracy—outside the confines of a laboratory.

Typically, a laboratory bench as big as a dining room table is required to house the assortment of lenses, polarizers, mirrors, and other apparatus required to manipulate even a single beam of laser light. Yet many quantum technologies, including miniature optical atomic clocks and some future quantum computers, will require simultaneous access to multiple, widely varying laser colors within a small region of space.

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