BOULDER, Colo., Jan 16, 2026, 02:31 MST
- Researchers reported an electrically powered “phonon laser” that generates surface vibrations on a chip.
- The team says the approach could replace bulky wireless filtering components used in phones and other radios.
- Key hurdles include pushing the device to higher frequencies and packaging it for mass production.
Researchers have built a chip-scale “phonon laser” that generates earthquake-like ripples across a material’s surface, a step they say could eventually shrink the wireless parts inside smartphones and other devices. Nature
The work matters because phones already lean on surface acoustic waves — tiny vibrations used to clean up noisy radio signals — but today’s designs typically spread that job across multiple components. The researchers’ pitch is a tighter radio front end, with fewer pieces to place, power and shield inside a handset. Digitaltrends
That squeeze is not going away. Qorvo, an acoustic-filter supplier, says next-generation high-end smartphones “demand more filters, with less space,” as wireless standards add bands and wider channels. Qorvo
The new device is bar-shaped and about half a millimetre long, built as a stack of silicon, lithium niobate and indium gallium arsenide, the researchers said. Lithium niobate is “piezoelectric,” meaning it converts an electric field into motion and back again — useful when you’re trying to turn electricity into precise vibrations. Colorado
Surface acoustic waves, or SAWs, travel along the top layer of a material, rather than through it — “like soundwaves” that skim the surface, the team said. “SAWs devices are critical to many of the world’s most important technologies,” Matt Eichenfield, a senior author, said, citing cell phones, GPS receivers and radar among the uses. Techxplore
Eichenfield’s group borrowed the logic of a diode laser, but swapped light for vibrations. “Think of it almost like the waves from an earthquake, only on the surface of a small chip,” lead author Alexander Wendt said. Eurekalert
The Nature paper said the team generated SAWs at 1 gigahertz and reported an output power of -6.1 dBm — a radio power unit — which is about 0.25 milliwatts. The authors reported a linewidth under 77 hertz (a measure of frequency purity) and said modelling points to smaller devices at 10 GHz, without needing an external radiofrequency source to start the wave. Nih
In the near term, the researchers are aiming at the clutter inside today’s radios. Phones “convert radio waves into SAWs and back again multiple times,” Eichenfield said, adding: “This phonon laser was the last domino standing.” Thedebrief
Acoustic filtering is already big business. Apple said in 2023 it signed a multiyear, multibillion-dollar deal with Broadcom that includes 5G radio frequency components “including FBAR filters,” a type of acoustic-wave filter used in phones. Apple
But the leap from a lab device to a phone is rarely clean. The prototype reported a 36-volt threshold bias in the paper, well above typical handset supply rails, and the team still needs to prove it can reliably reach much higher frequencies in a manufacturable package.
The researchers also framed broader uses, from GPS and radar to other wireless systems that need cleaner signals and tighter timing. If the approach scales, it could shift where signal-cleaning happens — less in bulky modules, more inside a single chip.
