Ladies & Gentleman: The Anti-Laser
Posted by Justin on July 31st, 2010
My feeble brain can’t process how this could be used, but I’m pretty sure it’s awesome.
“It’s kind of surprising that we’ve been using lasers for 50 years or so, and only now somebody noticed something pretty fundamental,” says Marin Solja?i?, a physicist at MIT who was not involved in the work.
Instead of amplifying light into coherent pulses, as a laser does, an antilaser absorbs light beams zapped into it. It can be “tuned” to work at specific wavelengths of light, allowing researchers to turn a dial and cause the device to start and then stop absorbing light.
“By just tinkering with the phases of the beams, magically it turns ‘black’ in this narrow wavelength range,” says team member A. Douglas Stone, a physicist at Yale University. “It’s an amazing trick.”
The option remains on the table to create a dual laser/anti-laser combo. Which is pretty much the coolest thing we’ve heard of today.
[Wired]
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August 1st, 2010 at 7:35 am
This is actually the greatest thing I've ever heard of, ever. Start saving your money now, because LASER KNIVES are about five years away!!!