Scientists build the world's first anti-laser

Link: BBC News - Scientists build the world's first anti-laser

An expensive beam dump?

I like the last line....

"The energy gets dissipated as heat. So if someone sets a laser on you with enough power to fry you, the anti-laser won't stop you from frying," he said.

Light is so complex thing, it has wave and particle like behave. I guess that muffler like effect happets to wave but what about particle like behave?
The things that makes you go hmmm :thinking:

I don't understand either... If I shine a laser at a piece of charcoal it absorbs the light and turns it into heat too.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but we've been able to cancel out a laser for a while now, using destructive interference.

Articles are too vague these days.

"Scientists create DPSS lasers on a wafer of silicon"

- Today, scientists created a prototype DPSS laser. The computer with which it was designed with uses chips made out of silicon to make computations! Perhaps we can fly to another planet with this technology!

</sarcasm>

So it's basically a beam dump... made of silicon? :undecided:

JimBolder said:

So it's basically a beam dump... made of silicon? :undecided:

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Yeah but This one costs 10,000,000,000$

Pure Awesomeness, where is the PP button?

is it still black? or is there another picture? Or do we have color options?

Krogith said:

Yeah but This one costs 10,000,000,000$

Pure Awesomeness, where is the PP button?

is it still black? or is there another picture? Or do we have color options?

Click to expand...

I demand mine to be mounted on a Captain America action figure. :crackup:

BShanahan14rulz said:

I don't understand either... If I shine a laser at a piece of charcoal it absorbs the light and turns it into heat too.

Click to expand...

From the article:

Building something which can absorb light over a wide range of wavelengths is pretty simple, said Professor Stone, but only doing so for a particular wavelength makes the anti-laser potentially useful in optical computing.

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It absorbs a single color of laser light, and no other colors. That's cool, and potentially very useful for switching, which is one of the basic building blocks of computing as we know it today.

Optical computing, like quantum computing, is still at a very basic level, and building basic components like this are essential. It took a long time to go from "we made a transistor!" and "we made a capacitor!" to "we made a working computer processor!"

We're still working on building blocks for future forms of computing, and every device that can be used in networks such as this is another step closer. Sure, not a revelation, but a cool step in the right direction.

It puzzled me too - surely its a nice idea, but i still have to see any practical application for this.

Optical computing sounds interesting, but this thing is entirely passive for now - it just absorbs light without any method to toggle that absorption. Perhaps at some time in the future it could be developed into an optical transistor: if a pump beam is somehow required to keep the absorption going, you would have a gate of sorts.

Benm said:

It puzzled me too - surely its a nice idea, but i still have to see any practical application for this.

Optical computing sounds interesting, but this thing is entirely passive for now - it just absorbs light without any method to toggle that absorption. Perhaps at some time in the future it could be developed into an optical transistor: if a pump beam is somehow required to keep the absorption going, you would have a gate of sorts.

Click to expand...

Other articles about the same stuff, with relevant quotations:

Physicists Build World’s First Antilaser | Wired Science | Wired.com

The device can only absorb one wavelength of light at a time, but that wavelength can be adjusted by changing the thickness of the wafer.

Surprisingly, the antilaser switched from absorbent to reflective when the researchers changed the way the waves met in the wafer. Under certain conditions, the silicon crystal actually helped light escape.

“That is a little surprising,” Cao said. “We can turn it on and off.”

.........

The most exciting applications will no doubt be those no one has thought of yet. The laser itself was called “a solution without a problem” when it first showed up.

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NewsFactor Network | Anti-Laser Could Boost Development of Optical Computers

The researchers said they can produce a version that generates electricity instead of heat.

..................................

The new device's claim to fame is that it can absorb a specific frequency. This is the key to its possible use in optical computers. Stone told news media that technologies needed for optical computers are filters that can be directed at a specific light wavelength, modulators to reduce a light beam's intensity, and transducers to turn light into electricity. The anti-laser can perform all three functions inexpensively.

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So yeah, there'll be applications. Not a quantum leap, but a cool step in the right direction.

Ah, PBD, I had only gotten around to about 3 articles on the "anti-laser" which made none of the important claims about its switch-ability, wavelength selectivity, and energy conversion into electricity. What is with reporting these days?!? And these punk kids who only read 3 articles and assume they know what they're talking about?!?

Thanks for those quotes. It really is much more exciting than I was lead to believe. In all of the articles I've seen, they used an image of two lasers hitting the device from opposite sides. I wonder if this is the first optical logic gate, where only lasers from both sides will turn the device "on." I like how almost all the special abilities of this device have something to do with the light entering it, though, as opposed to having to change the design to make it do something else, or applying a charge to make it switch.

We've got lasers that can be mounted on silicon chips, we've got this nifty little possible "logic structure thingamabob," and we've got a PBD. Where's our optical supercomputer?

Benm said:

It puzzled me too - surely its a nice idea, but i still have to see any practical application for this.

Optical computing sounds interesting, but this thing is entirely passive for now - it just absorbs light without any method to toggle that absorption. Perhaps at some time in the future it could be developed into an optical transistor: if a pump beam is somehow required to keep the absorption going, you would have a gate of sorts.

Click to expand...

From the article

Altering the wavelength of the incoming light means that the anti-laser can effectively be turned on and off - and that could be used in optical switches, Professor Stone told BBC News.

Click to expand...

Altering the wavelength isn't an easy thing to do, having multiple wavelengths is usually used to increase the bandwidth instead of switching with it.

All these discoveries may lead to usefull all-optical circuits, but some inventions are more usefull then others.

Photons are now Dirac! Not.

This guy isnt even wearing safety glasses



:na: