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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.
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!
here
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I am the dot in slashdot.org
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.)