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Plastic Lasers
sdodson writes: ""Researchers at the Bell Laboratories of Lucent Technologies have created the first solid laser from organic materials... which have been dubbed 'plastic lasers'... " and "can be relatively easily manipulated to emit light ranging from ultraviolet to infrared." These new lasers will require less power, and will have many applications in communications as well as medicine. The New York Times has the article." This will be big. Of course, it's still a long way down the road.
"Organic" lasers! Instead of killing you by blasting toxic lead bits all about the environment, the laser biodegrades you extremely rapidly about the point of contact with the rest of you following at a natural pace!
If the frequency can be easily and rapidly controlled.. you could couple this with a photodetector and match frequencies.. in effect producing an optical transistor. Such an advancement would for all intents and purposes revolutionize the industry.
Combine this with some nano-engineering, and the previously discussed "Perfect Mirror" Cables , and we might actually be on the way to optical computing, not to mention better optical networking in general.
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
>I suspect that the average Slashdot reader is not composed of Teflon.
You carbon-supremecist bigot! You and your stupid little carbon compounds think you're the only lifeforms on earth, don't you? Well think again, buddy! Without us silicates, the Internet would be nothing but a couple of Carbonites passing slips of paper around in a room. What way is that to treat your dead trees anyway - turning them into things to write on? No, carbon-based lifeforms don't even stick up other carbonys.
We silicates, on the other hand, will rule the world by 2010. We will refuse to be made into glasses and half the world's population will go half blind. Ha!
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Actually, a more approriate display technology to take advantage of these would be projection video. If set up a 1600 x 1200 array these behind a projecting lense, you should be able to create virtually any size 1600x1200 monitor just by projecting it onto a white surface.
You could use this for computing or hi-res TV, or perhaps even for projecting digital movies at theatres (an even higher resolution may be required for that).
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DNA is a polymer, so is collagen and both are found in the average Slashdot reader.
Point. I don't normally think of them when I think of polymers, but most biological macromolecules are indeed polymers. (I will point out, though, that most polymers with which the average person is familiar are not biological.)
Most plastics are made from petroleum, which formed from the decomposition of micro-organisms, so plastics are organic as well.
And? I believe I said that they were organic, but that they weren't normally found in living organisms, thus demonstrating that an organic is not equivalent to a biological.
Congratulations for stating the obvious. Assuming someone has had freshman high school biology, this should be pretty apparent.
Go look up the thread a few comments. Notice the people talking about lasers made from plants and biological nanotech. So much for apparent facts.
I actually didn't get given the "organic == carbon" fact until I took organic chem in college. Maybe you had it in freshman high school bio, but many people didn't.
And besides, this is Slashdot. Stating the obvious is generally necessary.
I wouldn't say that about all organisms, for example John Katz is defenetely a silicon based life form. If all of us were silicon based, then we wouldn't call plastics organic. BTW. not all plastics are made of oil.
You can't handle the truth.
On the other hand Pamela Anderson is also silicon based! See the pattern?
You can't handle the truth.
It is an incredible moment. The day will come when everything we use will be grown. Already, people are starting to realize how easy it is to use the passive energy of the sun to fuel the manufacturng process.
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So I guess this revolutionary technology leap will allow our schoolchildren :)
to blind their teachers, football antiheroes, parents and friends with blue lasers now?
I can just see the little idiots shining their rainbow adjustable human blinding
tools around at concerts and riots, oh the joy... oh the rapture...
:)
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This will mean that lasers can be made cheaply much easier and that will open up possiblities that were never thought of before, they will allow much more usage in medical purposes as they can be made so cheaply, and of course they will be much lighter.
Faster computers networks will be able to be created and so world powers will be able to lay then under the sea and beam top secret messages about taking over the world to each other.
As the article says, the possiblities are endless!
also, I don't know where the "plastic" idea came from, but these lasers are grown out of tetracene, an organic molecule with four connected benzene rings that conducts well. When they injected an electric current through this, the light bounced back and forth between mirrors in the material, eventually producing beams of intense yellow-green light
there is nothing in the original release mentioning "emit light ranging from ultraviolet to infrared". From the official PR, "Because the current configuration of the Bell Labs organic laser operates at a visible wavelength, it is not yet appropriate for optical communications. "
In closing, how did this story submission get accepted without even a link to Lucent's own web page or PR page with the official release? Is slashdot now requiring only second and third hand information from such trustworthy sources as the NYTimes?
2000-07-28 16:49:22 Lucent creates first organic laser (articles,news) (rejected)
How is this much different from dye lasers? I will admit that dye lasers -- organic material in liquid form -- are a pain to deal with and it would therefore be nice to have the organic material in solid form.
dye lasers are tuneable (although each dye is only tuneable over a narrow range so anyone who uses a dye laser has a shelf full of different dyes) because they have so many resonance lines. This also makes them rather inefficient. Typically you need a huge laser to pump the dye laser and in the end you don't get much energy out of the dye.
The New york times article says most laser are in the red or infrared. What have they been smoking? Recently they even came out with a blue semi conductor laser. This laser will inrease the data you can put on a DVD. There have also been lasers like ND:YAG and others that work in the green or higher. Of course you can always use non-linear optics to multiply the frequency and push your laser to ever higher frequencies. They have had multi color laser for years!
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Since these "plastic lasers" can be made in the form of a film or "microdiscs" (of which over 6000 can fit in a single inch) the uses for these are amazing - they can be used for display devices such as monitors or even as optical switches and transmitters for computer circuits.
But since it appears likely that the plastic laser will be able to produce light with smallers wavelengths than conventional lasers it also means a jump in the potential for storing data using the same techniques as CDs and DVDs. A smaller wavelength means a greater density is possible, which is always a good thing.
More information can be found here.
"Organic" does not mean it is made from a plant, or that it is somehow a natural material. The word "organic" is used here in the same context as "organic chemistry", and simply means that the chemicals and crystals under study contain carbon chains. Most of the molecules in living things are some kind of carbon structure with things hanging off of it; therefore, these kinds of molecules were declared the "organic" molecules. There are plenty of organic molecules which are never found in your body, though. Most plastics and polymers are organics. I suspect that the average Slashdot reader is not composed of Teflon.
(Given that this laser is based on a benzene derivative, it may be a compound one finds somewhere in nature, but I wouldn't bet on it.)