Novel design may boost efficiency of on-chip frequency combs

On the cover of the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon, a prism splits a ray of light into all the colors of the rainbow. This multicolored medley, which owes its emergence to the fact that light travels as a wave, is almost always hiding in plain sight; a prism simply reveals that it was there. For instance, sunlight is a mixture of many different colors of light, each bobbing up and down with their own characteristic frequency. But taken together the colors merge into a uniform yellowish glow.