Physicists Build World’s First Antilaser

[n2doc]

By Lisa Grossman February 17, 2011




Less than a year after it was first suggested, the world’s first antilaser is here. A team of physicists have built a contraption that, instead of flashing bright beams, utterly extinguishes specific wavelengths of light.

Conventional lasers create intense beams of light by stimulating atoms to spit out a coherent beam of light in which all the light waves march in lockstep. The crests of one wave match the crests of all the others, and troughs match up with troughs.

The antilaser does the reverse: Two perfect beams of laser light go in, and are completely absorbed.

“There will be nothing coming out again,” said experimental physicist Hui Cao of Yale University, whose research group built the new device.

The device could find uses in fields from computing to medical imaging, the researchers report in the Feb. 18 Science.



more

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/real-live-antilaser/

[damntexdem]

1. Nonlight nonamplification by nonstitumlated nonemission of nonradiation?

Oh, two laser beams go in and are completely absorbed -- sort of like U.S. economic health under GOP control. ;-)

[cliffordu]

2. WELL PLAYED!!!!

:rofl:

[VWolf]

3. Wait. Then would it be called a Nnnnn ?

Make sure you use Dr Evil's finger quotes when you say "Anti-Laser"

[LiberalFighter]

4. How about empty minds (Republicans) being absorbed and extinquished?

[phantom power]

5. I wonder where the photon energy is going.

[qazplm]

6. heat?

that would be my guess.

[Ready4Change]

8. That's my question too.

Energy goes into making those beams. Where does it go?

Just as you can't create energy from nothing, you can't just wipe it out either. Heat? Kinetic motion? Is some entangled alien on a distant world getting a wedgie? What?

[Recursion]

13. Phonons

But then semiconductors was probably my least favorite class so take that with a grain of halides.

[jberryhill]

15. Should have gone with the alien getting a wedgie

...but in k-space.

Or... there is a carrier population inversion going on, and someone needs to keep skimming off the excess minority carriers.

[Recursion]

17. Don't I feel like a dope

OK, that pun sucked, but it's 4pm on a friday....

[Thor_MN]

7. UltraThunderDome, 2 beams enter, no beams leave

[BadgerKid]

9. The Laser Motel.

Beams come in, but they don't get out.

[DetlefK]

10. Overstatements galore!

"utterly extinguishes specific wavelengths of light." - Wrong, it only extinguishes one specific wavelength at a time.

"Two perfect beams of laser light go in, and are completely absorbed." - Wrong, it's just 99.4%.

The central part of the device is a micrometer-thick silicium wafer. The laser-beams are brought into destructive interference and the lattice converts the energy into phonons and the likes. That doesn't sound impressive to me: It's an interferometer that only works for one kind of wavelength.

[TheMadMonk]

11. It's an inteferrometer which took best part of a century to turn into a...

working practicality.

I'm impresssed.

[DetlefK]

12. Find a way to make it work independent of wafer thickness, and I'm impressed.

[jberryhill]

16. Mmmm....

I wouldn't really call it an interferometer, since there's no constructive interference going on someplace else.

The subject makes me chuckle though, because I had an opto prof with a type of accent known for ambiguity between "L" and "R" sounds, and listening to him struggle through "Fabry-Perot Interferometer" and "Laser Hologram" for a semester was just painful.

He made "hologram" sound like a thank-you note that one might send to a prostitute.

[felix_numinous]

14. Like a mini black hole? nt

[Orsino]

18. I could totally not take over the world with such a device.

The fools! I won't destroy them all!

[DetlefK]

19. No, you won't won't.