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Posted by rbanffy 6 hours ago

NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers(www.nist.gov)
160 points | 70 commentspage 2
himata4113 3 hours ago|
since the light range is so high, technically speaking as the technology improves does that mean we could end up sending petabytes a second over a single fiber optic core?
tbrownaw 3 hours ago|
Visible light is a bit less than a petahertz, so no.
osamagirl69 2 hours ago||
Would you care to explain how the NICT guys achieved 402Tb/s through a single (50km long!) fiber back in 2024 then? It seems like another factor of two would easily be in reach if they could extend their setup into the visible.
evo 3 hours ago||
I wonder if this is a nuclear proliferation risk--could it be used for AVLIS/SILEX?
jcims 4 hours ago||
Can each device vary the color or is it fixed based on how it’s built? Seems the latter?
2ndorderthought 3 hours ago|
I believe you are right.
aftbit 5 hours ago||
Cool, can I get a "proper" yellow diode laser from this? What's the efficiency look like?
deepsun 3 hours ago||
Would I finally be able to see bright brown?
nine_k 3 hours ago|
It's called orange. Much like bright gray is called white, and bright teal is called turquoise.
rafram 3 hours ago||
Light brown is called tan. Dark and light oranges exist too and they’re not exactly the same as brown.
drivers99 1 hour ago||
See Technology Connections' video about Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

He says brown is perceived when you see an orange-wavelength light that is significantly darker than its surroundings, providing the necessary context for your brain to interpret it as brown.

wizardforhire 2 hours ago||
Just read the article and didn't see anything about building an actual laser… what details the article has (and its scant) its seems they took a fluorescing layer and sandwiched with a color wheel and added the additional wiring and control circuitry… (Obviously more nuanced and interesting physics but still…) cool and practical, but not a diode and definitely not a laser… I could be wrong and would love to be!

… now, if that setup could be drawn out into a fiber laser as cladding with a wide spectrum neural amplifying core (if such a material exists) that could maybe be something idk

lwansbrough 2 hours ago||
0.1nm please. It's x-ray lithography time!
loudmax 1 hour ago|
I was thinking the same thing. The stuff ASML does to produce a light at exactly the right wavelength is bananas. Making of stream of molten tin, and shooting each droplet with a laser, twice! Then bouncing the light through a series of super high precision mirrors to capture just the right spread. If you can get a laser to produce your desired wavelength without all that complexity, that's a major breakthrough.
cheschire 4 hours ago||
Yes but can it do any color a mantis shrimp would like?

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp

Tade0 4 hours ago||
The Mantis Shrimp most likely sees very much like us (or birds, snakes), it's just that its brain is too small to integrate signals from just three types of cones, so it evolved a whole rainbow of cones.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago||
Huh. Anywhere you'd suggest I can read more about this?
skoocda 3 hours ago||
This misses one of the best mantis shrimp facts.

One of its receptors only detects circularly polarized light

But the only thing we know of, in the entire natural world, that emits circularly polarized light... is the reflection off the shell of the mantis shrimp.

__MatrixMan__ 4 hours ago|
I'll take one in gamma please.
Retro_Dev 4 hours ago|
A gamma wavelength handheld laser would be cool; "and on this petri dish, we see a dot of cells instantaneously develop cancer"
__MatrixMan__ 3 hours ago||
At high energies I think you could point two at a spot in space and get antimatter where the beams cross (also matter, and then an explosion... see the Breit-Wheeler process).

We have a hard enough time building shipping-container sized devices that reflect extreme ultraviolet though... so I think a handheld gamma ray laser is off the table for this century.

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