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UV Nanolasers From ZnO Nanowires
The Evil Dwarf from Hell writes: "This weeks Science has an article on ZnO nanowire base UV lasers, abstract ( paid subscritption required for article). The 70 to 100 nm diameter wires lase at 386nm, line width .3 nm. The growth takes place on a thin Au film on a sapphire surface, and the wires reach lengths of 2 to 10 m. What makes this lasing unusual is it occurs without the use of mirrors. Apparently ZnO forms a natural lasing cavity. (The lasing is optically pumped from a Nd:YAG laser)." The link above is registration-required, but there's another article which describes the whole process.
I want Microsoft bashing. I want software release notices. I want anti-big-industry rants. I want free software cheerleading.
How am I supposed to follow the party line if real News for Nerds and Stuff that matters shows up here?
The peer review costs money.
The peer review costs money.
Not as much as you might think. We reviewers aren't paid for the reviews: it's regarded as part of our professional responsibility. (The same happens with grant reviews: the vast majority is done by other scientists.)
Many journals charge money to print articles, others charge literally thousands of dollars/year for a subscription. This is a huge bone of contention on many campuses: Professor A and B want the Journal of Obscure Latvian Chemistry at $2000/year, but C and D would rather have Acta Trivia at $2500/year. Academic budgets aren't much- what do you do?
Science and Nature are special cases: there's significant editorial comment in each, and so the costs of printing them are much higher. (The first 3rd of each is quite understandable by any interested layman.)
So why not go electronic? Simple: electronic reserves have a miserable record of longevity. I can and have looked up articles from 1920, and that's hardly the limit. We can't read electronic Pioneer data from the 1960s.
Keeping old journal articles in a format that's always readable is going to cost, and cost big. You'll need multiple servers so that a single crash doesn't kill you, and sysadmins to care for the machines, bandwidth costs, plus format conversion.
And of course, you'll still need to pay for the staff to handle sending articles around for peer review.
Stanford has a program that's looking into solving some of these problems with a distributed system, but it's going to be a long, long time before we abandon paper.
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Who wrote this? Michael or Geordi LaForge?
Wait a minute here! Zinc Oxide is the stuff you use to keep damaging UltraViolet sunlight off your face. Now they're using it to turn it into UV Lasers? I can feel my nose burning already. Ouch!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Not quite. The physical size of the lasing device is irrelevant; all that matters (WRT putting data on a surface) is the light coming out of it.
Any decent laser can be used to produce an incredibly thin beam, such that the limiting factor becomes the wavelength of the light. This is the reason for all the brouhaha over blue lasers - nothing to do with the physical size of the laser, but the fact that using a smaller wavelength allows you to pack more data on the surface.
Now, physical dimensions aside, these *are* UV, so clearly they're short-wavelength lasers, but IIRC the blue lasers are around 460nm (is that right?) so a 386nm UV would allow for roughly 42% more data to be packed on a given surface.
Of course, use of UV lasers in home electronics devices could be *really* dangerous, because if you somehow looked into the laser you wouldn't even realize it until you noticed the irreparable damage to your retina.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Shoudn't this kind of research, mostly funded by with government money, be published in free foruns?
I understand paper and ink costs money, and atm-links also cost, but this kind of public-funded research should be made freely available to the interested public, besides perhaps being published in "reference magazines".
You cannot proceed from the informal to formal by formal means
...lots of research just as interesting as this gets published all the time. ZnO is a wide-bandgap material enjoying a renaissance of interest, and might compete with SiC, DLC, and GaN, but I'm not sure this is worthy of a full-blown /. article. Now combinatorial MBE to explore the TiO2:Co system, that was /. worthy ;-)
If these new lasers are 100 times smaller than the old ones, would I be correct in guessing that the optical discs resulting from this new technology would store 100 times more data (or maybe 10000 times, if it works in two dimesions)? How long then, would it be before such discs could replace your old hard disks?
One day, you know, this miniaturisation will just stop... there has to be a limit to it.